Into the Woods
by slaygirl101
Summary: After being left on the beach the Doctor, Rose and Jackie are forced to stay overnight in a small Norway village until they can get home, but something strange is happening in the quiet town.
1. Chapter 1

Title: Into the Woods

Pairing: TenII/Rose  
Spoilers: Just to be safe let's say everything up to JE.  
Disclaimer: I don't own them and I make no money off of them (if anything it's the other way around)

Authors Note: This is my first multi-chapter Doctor Who fic, I made sure to finish writing the whole thing before posting to make sure I did, in fact, finish writing it. So that means I'll be updating it every week.

Thank you to my amazing beta lj user="mik109" who doesn't really watch Doctor Who but was immensely helpful anyhow. You and you're bat are a big reason this got finished on time.

It wasn't fair. That was the first thought that popped into her head no matter how childish it was, and she was anything but a child. She was far from it in fact, which was something she would share with anyone who tried to tell her otherwise and with a great deal of passion if she was so inclined. No, Maren was not childish, regardless of being only three months shy of seven-years-old, or anything her brother would tell you.

The truth was Maren had always been something of a clever girl and because of that had always felt she was far older than her actual six years of age would lead a person to believe. This was a belief she had held ever since her father had made the very same observation out loud one fateful night during her usual bedtime story.

That night had begun like any other for Maren. Her father had come home and took her upstairs and tucked her into bed and asked her which story she wanted to hear. She had just begun to explain to her father how her brother had insisted bedtime stories were for babies and not, in fact, real at all, and she should spend her time doing better things when the screaming from outside had begun.

Her brother said the creatures that had attacked their town were not actually monsters at all, but simply humans who were turned into robots. She had later decided that that simply wasn't true, and the things that had rushed out of the forest like a nightmare and killed her father as well as several other people from the town had been exactly what they looked like, large metal monsters. This observation did little to convince her brother though, and they oftentimes argued about it.

It was one of these such arguments that had led her to the opening of the cave, a monstrous thing not far from the edge of the forest. She wasn't frightened as she stared down the hole in the earth that reminded her of a gaping mouth for some reason, even though tales of goblins and trolls rang in her ears. No, not scared at all. She was merely curious.

The sun flitted through the autumn leaves in the trees casting small beams of light into the dark recesses of the cave, making something within sparkle and shimmer in the light. It was almost as though the rock walls were covered in small diamonds, or perhaps a thin layer of saliva on the off chance this actually was the mouth of some huge beastie.

She stopped fiddling with the necklace her father had given her on her last birthday and straightened her shoulders mentally preparing herself for the adventure the cave promised. Just as she was about to set foot inside the cave she found herself stopped by a hand on her shoulder. It was this hand, one attached to her brother, which caused her thoughts to focus solely on a mantra of "this isn't fair".

"What do you think you're doing?" He chided his little sister who stood glaring up at him for all she was worth. "Mom's told you a thousand times you aren't supposed to play in the woods alone. You could get hurt, or worse you could get me in trouble." He explained angrily as he turned his sister around and began to march her back towards the town and their house.

"You wouldn't get in trouble! I came out here on my own." She explained dejectedly as she let Jonas lead her back towards their house. "Besides I wasn't doing anything wrong."

"You were in the woods and mom told you not to be. That makes it wrong."

Maren glanced back towards her brother as best she could with both his hands firmly placed on her shoulders. "You play in the woods."

"That's different." He said and continued their march back towards their house. When he realized Maren was still straining her neck to send him a sad look over her shoulder, he grudgingly added, "She doesn't tell me not to play in the woods.".

"I'm not talking to you." She decided aloud as she attempted to dig her heels in and stop their forward progress. It didn't work.

"Well, you can go ahead and not talk to me all the way back home." Her brother replied simply as he pushed forward a little harder causing young Maren to move forward as well.

"I don't want to go back home."

"Oh, look, you're talking to me, and it only took a few seconds to get there. How nice."

Maren sighed and turned to look forward again as she was lead onward a few more meters. "I found something in the woods." She said quietly, "It looked like a lair for an evil witch."

With a roll of his eyes and a deep groan, her brother stopped and spun Maren around so they could look at each other. "No, you didn't, because there's no such thing. Fairytales aren't real, Maren, and those 'Metal Monsters' you're always talking about didn't escape from one of them. They were Cybermen. When are you going to just accept that bad things happen sometimes? Dad's gone and it isn't because of one of those fairytales you're so obsessed with." He finished angrily finally letting go of his sister's shoulders so he could cross his arms across his chest.

Maren glared at her older brother for all she was worth before she spun on her heel and took off into the woods again.

The momentary shock of watching his young sister turn and run off in a seemingly random direction caused Jonas to stare and his mind to begin his own version of 'this isn't fair.' The shock wore off quickly enough though, and he ran after her.

Maren ran as fast as her legs would take her without one thought as to what direction she was running in. The thing her brother didn't realize was that she had found something interesting in the woods, something that shouldn't be in the woods, it didn't even belong in that world. And the thing that Maren didn't realize was that what she thought she had found was only a small part of it, and that she was currently running right into the middle of something much bigger.

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And then there were two. Well, and Jackie. But she was far enough back she didn't really register and so she shouldn't really count should she? That was all besides the point anyway. The point was that they were left behind, out on a lonely beach in Norway.

He really hated this beach. It was strange to hate a place so completely, especially one he had only ever visited once before now. Even stranger when it doubled as the location of one of the best moments in his recent history. Though really all of his history was recent, wasn't it? He was born, he helped save reality, he wiped-out the Daleks, he helped tow Earth back to the Milky Way, and then he was dropped off in a parallel universe to live out a happily ever after with the love of his life.

As he looked into her eyes, eyes that for all intents and purposes had haunted him for two years now, he realized something the other him had never even considered. He didn't blame the other him for it. Had their positions been reversed, he truly doubted he would have taken it into consideration either, but the fact remained that he had effectively just done the one thing he had promised Rose he would never do. He had left her behind.

There was only so much one could say with their eyes and he was fairly certain 'I'm sorry a duplicate me abandoned you on a cold beach in Norway in a parallel world where he effectively cut you off from himself for good…again…' was one of those things that would get lost in translation.

Rose looked away from the man holding her hand to stare at the shallow dent in the sand left by the recently departed TARDIS. "It's like every time I'm on this beach you break my heart." She said quietly, eyes still locked on the empty space.

His eyes fell to the beach, finally looking away from her sad face. He did seem to be annoyingly good at breaking her heart.

He was an idiot if he thought this would turn out differently. Honestly, what had he expected her to do? Say 'toodle pip have a good life while I shack up with a copy of you and have that brilliant life I always wanted but couldn't have because you have deeply rooted relationship issues' and then waltz off into the sunset like this was some sort of demented fairytale? That never would have happened. Rose had never wanted him to be alone, and she never would. Even if he had completely regenerated and looked like a brand new man, she wouldn't have wanted to let him go on that beach. Of course, that's why he did what he did.

Rose, his brilliant beautiful Rose, she really was too good for him. She'd always been too good for him. Now, he'd gone and tricked her into staying in a parallel world with the new him, and he wasn't entirely sure she would forgive him for that when she realized it. He was even less sure he would ever forgive himself.

The two of them stood stiffly there on the beach. Eyes fixed on the square indent in the sand in front of them. Hands still clasped together, though neither of them really registered that.

"So what do we do now?"

His single human heart seemed to skip a beat. She said we. He hadn't expected her to not say we, or, well to be more accurate, he didn't expect her to not want to say we. However, it didn't make it any less thrilling to hear her actually say it, especially considering the current track of his thoughts.

"Well…I suppose we go back, join your mother," he said jerking his head back towards unusually quiet Jackie, "and wait to get a ride."

He made sure to keep his answer short and just vague enough to let her know that he didn't presume to jump back into her life right where they had left off, even if she had just snogged him senseless and said we. Regardless of what the other him asked of her, even though he knew she would simply because of that, she didn't have to watch after him.

He might be the same man, in spite of the human DNA now swimming its way about in his body, but that wouldn't change the fact that he had lived two whole years without her in his life. Two years of adventures and trouble and an almost bone aching sense of sadness from the lack of her at his side. The same could be mostly likely be said for her, though the time frame was probably different what with Pete's world moving faster than his own.

Come to think of it, he really had no idea how long it had been for her since that day at Canary Wharf. He had lived two years, even if the rest of the world had only lived one, since the Daleks had broken through the void and the Cybermen from Pete's world had made their attempt at invasion. He would have to ask sometime, though he doubted he would like the answer.

He would also have to start referring to this world as something other than Pete's world because it was, after all, now his world as well. Maybe he should just come up with a name for the other world, the correct one. He grimaced to himself at the thought. It wouldn't do to start thinking about everything like that. The real world or the right one, he was here, and so was Rose…and that made it the right one to be in regardless of where he had been born.

Rose turned to look at him, the same slightly confused and sad look on her face that was there as the TARDIS disappeared from both of their lives forever. "And then?" She asked quietly almost as if she didn't really want the answer to her question.

"And then…" he started, having to look away from her eyes because he couldn't ignore the loss he saw there. "We'll figure it out." He finished answering her quietly, squeezing her hand tightly as though he could drown out every fear he had about her leaving him if he could only hold onto her tight enough.

Rose opened her mouth as if she were about to say something but the words never came, instead she chose to stare down at their still entwined hands. It wasn't until he noticed that her eyes were no longer fixed on him that the Doctor looked up, and he would have given anything to know what she was thinking at that moment.

"I got hold of your father. Everything's fine." Explained a voice from behind them.

Ah, Jackie. Had it been any other time, he probably would have muttered something rude under his breath and plastered on a fake grin to keep her at bay. As it was, he was rather thankful for the interruption.

"Said all the planets are comin' back an' the void is practically all sealed up again." She explained as she walked towards the two. She had tried to stay out of their way so they could start working things out, but it was the middle of fall and this bloody beach was freezing. All of her good intentions had blown away with the wind whipping around them.

"How long's it been since the planets started showing up again?" Rose asked turning away from the Doctor, obviously intent on ignoring whatever it was she had been about to say to him.

Jackie shook her head as she walked over to the pair. "Don't know. Didn't ask. It was hard enough to ask him how Tony was an' tell him where we were with all the noise in the background. Said Torchwood is going crazy. S'like they're throwin' a giant party."

"An 'all of reality didn't cease to exist' party," The Doctor said with a small quirk of his lips.

"Yeah, well, sounds like your kind of party then." Jackie said trying to keep herself from rolling her eyes at him. Honestly, the pair of them were ridiculous. After everything they had gone through to get back together, they were going to just pretend nothing had happened, and that they were both fine when they clearly weren't. The two of them were impossible, and now, she was going to be stuck with the both of them. "He said we could get back on the next zeppelin out of here." She mentally began tallying how long she thought it would be until one of them said that they would be 'fine'.

"When's that?"

"In three days. Over in Bergen." Jackie said, giving her daughter a sad look. Three days until she would get to see her son and her husband again. What was worse was it was going to be three days with the two of them moping about and trying to ignore talking about their feelings. Jackie found herself momentarily cursing the parallel world she found herself living in. Why couldn't they have airplanes like any decent universe? She was going to go mental waiting for that damn balloon.

"Bergen?" The Doctor asked, his face scrunching up not unlike a fish out of water. "That's over 50 miles from here."

"Well, there's a town not far from here."

"S'where we stayed last time we were here," Rose explained further, carefully ignoring the sad look he gave her when he realized what she had meant by the last time. "Should be able to make it there before dark."

"Right…well, we better get a move on then. Allons-y." he said with a forced kind of lightheartedness.

As the three of them turned to make their way off of the beach, for what he honestly hoped was the last time ever because really the last thing he needed was to see that beach again. He noticed Rose was walking slightly ahead of both he and her mother, her shoulders were slightly slumped, but he couldn't exactly tell if that was from her current state of mind or from the mostly uphill climb they were trudging to get off the afore mentioned blasted beach.

She didn't exactly seem interested in talking about… well anything really. Which was more than fine with him; Donna hadn't changed him that much. Still, after their rather unique reunion and saving all of reality and being abandoned in a parallel universe together, maybe a good chat was exactly what they needed. And by good chat, he preferred it be one they could have without worrying about her mother overhearing the entire exchange.

"You okay then?" A voice asked from beside him, snapping him out of his own thoughts rather effectively, as Jackie often did.

"Of course I am." He answered quickly. While he was somewhat glad to be relieved from his, often times, distressing thoughts, it didn't change the fact that he felt he rather needed to be alone with them currently. They would be walking for a while, or at least he assumed they would be since neither of the Tyler women had actually told him how far away the town they were headed for was, and he really needed to plan out what he was going to say to Rose once they got there.

The two continued walking in silence for a few moments.

"Why wouldn't I be?" He asked suddenly, after all being left alone to one's own thoughts was completely overrated. Besides, he never was one to ignore a comment like that, least of all one from Jackie. "Do I look unwell?"

"No," she said with a small frown and a shake of her head. "S'just… last time you were out all Christmas Eve." She explained as she watched him out of the corner of her eye.

"Oh, no." He said with a small shake of his head. "Won't happen this time. Only reason it happened last time was because of the time vortex. It's very hard to completely expel that amount of energy, believe it or not. Some of it got trapped, that's all. Like when the hull of a piece of popcorn gets stuck between your teeth, I hate when that happens. It just gets stuck down there and you can feel it but you can't get it out it's…horrible."

"So you still talk too much then." Jackie said with a small smirk.

"Oy!" The Doctor exclaimed indignantly as he stopped in his tracks. He watched the still retreating backs of the two women, a deep frown on his face. "I do not now, nor have I ever, talked too much."

TBC

AN2: I spent my entire winter break writing this story and it turned into a miniepic (not intentional at all mind you) and I usually do long chapters, between 4-8 thousand words which has gotten me a few complaints in the past so this is the first time I went through and split up my chapters into smaller, bite-sized chunks. I hope that works for everyone.


	2. Chapter 2

Title: Into the Woods (1/20)  
Pairing: TenII/Rose  
Rating: PG  
Genre: Romance, drama, action/adventure (eventually)  
Spoilers: Just to be safe let's say everything up to JE.  
Disclaimer: I don't own them and I make no money off of them (if anything it's the other way around)  
Summary: After being left on the beach the Doctor, Rose and Jackie are forced to stay overnight in a small Norway village until they can get home, but something strange is happening in the quiet town.

Authors Note: This is my first multi-chapter Doctor Who fic, I made sure to finish writing the whole thing before posting to make sure I did, in fact, finish writing it. So that means I'll be updating it every week.

Thank you to my amazing beta lj user="mik109" who doesn't really watch Doctor Who but was immensely helpful anyhow. You and you're bat are a big reason this got finished on time.

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It just had to be fall, didn't it? It couldn't have been spring or summer? Oh no, because that would mean the walk from the beach to the nearest town would have at least been spent in pleasant weather.

Maybe she shouldn't complain too much. At least this way, she could blame the awkwardness of the walk to town on the horrible wind and bitter cold of Norway in autumn, rather than any monumental uncertainty about what to say to him. Not that that excuse would work for much longer. In another twenty minutes, they'd be in town. And that meant she'd have to talk to him, which in turn meant she needed to get her thoughts in order so she could have an actual conversation instead of relying on the one word answers that had been serving her so well with her mother for the journey thus far.

She wanted to be happy. Considering everything that had happened, she really truly wanted to be happy. She had proved she knew a thing or two about aliens and that she could achieve the impossible thanks to that handy little dimension cannon of hers. She had just saved all of reality, managed to stay with her family after all, and she finally got the guy. So why was she so sad?

She wasn't naïve enough to think everything would turn out just peachy the moment she found him again. That they would run into each other's arms and everything would go back to the way it had been before she was trapped in a parallel world. That they would save all of reality and then just run off into the sunset together. Nothing ever went smoothly, not for them at any rate. If she hadn't known that already, the Dalek that shot him when they iwere/i running into each other's arms was proof enough.

No, while she had no clue how she had expected everything to turn out, she knew that ideal scenario wasn't it. She also knew it definitely wasn't this either.

Only he could take what should have been the happiest day of her life, and, instead of just being happy, make her re-evaluate everything she had ever thought was possible. 'Part of what you get when you're in love with an impossible man,' she mused to herself. 'Or two impossible men as it turns out,' she corrected herself sarcastically.

Why did he have to split into two bloody men? How was that fair? After how hard she had worked to get back to him, and after everything he had done for the universe, he had to go and get shot by a bloody Dalek and regenerate into two copies of the exact same man. Nothing was ever simple with him.

She chanced a glance over to the man walking next to her. He was probably the biggest reason she was angry. He, the other him who wasn't currently walking next to her, had run off and left her in a parallel world with a human him. A human copy of the exact same man, only this one could grow old with her, and it made her furious how perfect it was.

It wasn't right to want and kiss someone as much as she wanted to kiss him, while also really wanting to punch him as hard as she possibly could. It wasn't fair to him that she wanted to punch him. It wasn't even Ihim/I she even wanted to punch. It was the other him.

'He just wants you to be happy' a small voice said in the back of her head. She quickly told it to sod off and mind its own damn business. And it was so him too, masochist that he was, to really feel the only way she could be happy was if he was miserable. He never took the time to ask her. Oh no, she couldn't possibly have a say in her own future. So what if the thing that would make her happy would be seeing him happy? Was that really too much to ask?

She clenched her teeth. She was back to angry again because only he could set her up with everything as perfect as she could ever get, but, at the same time, ensure his own eternal loneliness. Bloody man.

After all of the time apart, he had been right there, him and that amazing ship of his, and then poof he left. Again! He left her behind, on that same bloody beach, without even saying goodbye. He ran away while she was distracted. He had already made up her mind for her. Like always. He decided she'd rather have the easy way out, and so he ran away.

'Does it need saying?' Yes, it bloody well does! Leave it to him. The only way he can say it is if he's sure he'll never see her again, or if he ends up being part human apparently.

He never would have said it either, the end of that sentence. Even if there wasn't a second him and she had stayed in his universe with him, because it hurt too much and she understood that. She was ready and willing to travel with him forever. She'd never cared about growing old while he stayed young, just so long as they were together. That was selfish of her, and she realized that. It really wasn't fair to him making him watch her slip away, and that's exactly what would have happened. She would have traveled with him forever, best mates 'til the end.

Oh, who was she kidding? If it hadn't been for that Dalek, she would have snogged him senseless in the middle of that street, fate of the multi-verse be damned.

Rose sighed in frustration. She never expected to spend so much time dwelling on the last few years after today. If she was completely honest, she hadn't expected to ever think about the last few years again at all.

When they had first been stranded in this world, Jackie had told her that she was happy Pete had gone back for her, but that was when she thought she had gotten her daughter back rather than a ghost. That was the only way to describe what she was for those first few months she spent in this world, a ghost. Then she'd had the dream that ended up being him trying to say goodbye to her.

That day on the beach had been the first day of the rest of her life. She had decided then and there to stop dwelling on what was and start working for what could be…what would be if she had anything to say about it. He had given her his blessing, in his own unique way, to work at Torchwood, and she would. She would work every day for the rest of her life if she had too, but one way or another, she would be back at his side.

While she had been fuming and reminiscing with herself, Rose's pace had quickened, and she suddenly realized she was walking well ahead of her mother and the Doctor. She blinked. It was rather nice of them to leave her alone with her thoughts she decided as she passed over the last hilltop between them and the town they were headed for. The forest that it now stretched out before her, dense and flush with autumn color.

She gave out a quiet bitter laugh. Of course they were almost be there now, 'cause why would she ever need another hour or two to think things through before talking with him?

Rose shook her head at her unhelpful thoughts and stared up at the cloudy sky. She sighed. Course it was fall, it had to be fall, the season of change. It wouldn't be nearly as poetic if it was any other time of the year. She grinned ruefully before tripping and almost falling flat on her face.

After her near face plant, which she recovered from with a minimum amount of flailing, not that it mattered since her Mum and the Doctor were just now making their way over the top of the hill and thus thankfully were not witness to the stumble, she turned back towards whatever it was that had tripped her up. "That's…strange," Rose wondered aloud, staring at the ground around her feet.

"Finally!" Jackie called out as she and the Doctor reached the top of the hill. "We're almost there."

"You mean the town where we're staying is in the middle of a dark and foreboding forest?" The Doctor asked as he surveyed the woods lying before him before turning back to find Jackie glaring at him. "Right, course it is." He nodded sharply as he followed her down the hill towards Rose.

"If you think the forest is foreboding, you're gonna love this." Rose said, eyes scanning the edge of the forest.

"Oh, well, that is interesting." The Doctor agreed as he came up next to her, surveying the small feathered bodies dotted along the edge of the forest along with her.

"Oh, that's disgusting." Jackie looked horrified as the Doctor stooped down towards the body of a dead bird.

"What do you think killed 'em?" Rose asked as she crouched down next to the Doctor.

"Oh, any number of reasons really, but, if one believes in Occam's Razor, which I do, but only because it was my theory first, I'd say they got into a crop that had too much pesticide." He explained eyes still fixed on the nearest bird.

"Occam stole your theory?" Rose asked, fighting back a grin.

"Course he did." He said with a slightly hurt tone. "You don't mean you really think a 14th century friar came up with lex parsimoniae on his own do you?" He asked with that all too familiar grin of his, the kind that could turn her insides to mush in seconds flat. "Can't be too angry about it though. Occam's razor sounded better than the Doctor's Razor in the long run, or any run for that matter."

Rose sent him a small grin as he looked back down towards the bird. It was almost scary how easy it was to fall back into their old rhythm, like nothing had ever happened, like they hadn't been separated for years or had just gone through one of the biggest changes in either of their lives.

"I missed you." She said quietly making his head snap back up so he could look her in the eyes. Maybe all of that thinking she had been doing wasn't really the best idea in the long run. She'd never spent that much time worrying about what to say to him before, why should now be any different?

"I missed you, too."

They stared at each other for a long moment. Neither able to break away.

"Enough with dead things! Let those birds be," barked Jackie as she returned to their trek, refusing to consider anyone's or anything's mortality one more time today. Besides, they could make googly eyes at each other when she was somewhere indoors.

That broke their eye lock. Rose quirked a sheepish half-smile at the Doctor before quickly rising to rejoin her mother. The Doctor rolled his eyes and followed.

As they continued down the road, the Doctor took a moment to scan the dense forest they were entering. He had never really been to Norway before, so he didn't have much to go on as far as personal experience, but he had to admit he never expected the country to have forests like this one.

"I don't know about the pair of you, but when we get into town, I am marching up to the first motel I see and I'm getting a room and I'm going to go straight to bed."

"I think we could all use some sleep, Mum." Rose said with a small smile aimed at her mother. "Unless you still don't sleep…" she began to question, turning towards where the Doctor was, or at least where he was only a moment ago, because he seemed to have vanished all of a sudden.

Rose stopped where she was and turned back around farther to find the Doctor standing several meters behind them, eyes fixed on the woods. She glanced between him and the general area of the forest where his gaze was focused. "Doctor? What is it?"

He shook his head a little, still staring intently into the forest. "I thought I saw…I don't know…probably nothing."

"I know the feeling." Jackie said as she also stared into the trees that framed either side of the road they were following. "This forest gives me the creeps."

He shook his head at Jackie's comment. "It's more than that. It's like there's something hanging in the air. Can't you feel it?" He asked turning to look at the two women next to him. "Like some sort of energy or a field or something." He said, looking at the back of his hand and noting that the hair there was the exact same as it had always been and was not, as he had expected it to be, standing up.

Maybe he was just tired and imaging it? Or maybe along with his one heart and all of the new human emotions and hormones he would have to get used to he also got an extra dose of paranoia? Which, if that were the case, was something he was going to need to keep in check around others. There was no need worrying everyone if it was just his overactive Time Lord brain playing tricks on the rest of his lesser human physiology.

He was worried that getting used to being half human, or however part human he was as Donna hadn't exactly become half Time Lord during the meta-crisis so there was no reason for him to be exactly half human now, was going to take longer than he had originally anticipated. He sighed to himself, quietly so the others couldn't hear him, before looking back towards the forest.

All three of them were staring into the forest, trying to see whatever it was that had caught the Doctor's attention in the first place. A loud howl ripped through the quiet, causing Jackie to jump slightly.

"Right then, let's go." She decided, turning and starting off back down the road towards the town quickly.

"I didn't know Norway still had wolves." The Doctor ruminated aloud as he turned to follow after Jackie with Rose at his side.

"It does in this universe."

"Com'n you two, shift! I don't want to be stuck out here at night with a bunch of wolves running around." Jackie cried from a good ten meters in front of them.

"You know. she's got a point."

"Words I never thought I'd agree with." He said with a small smirk as the two of them continued to follow after Jackie.

~TBC


	3. Chapter 3

Title: Into the Woods (3/20)  
Pairing: TenII/Rose  
Rating: PG  
Genre: Romance, drama, action/adventure (eventually)  
Spoilers: Just to be safe let's say everything up to JE.  
Disclaimer: I don't own them and I make no money off of them (if anything it's the other way around)  
Summary: After being left on the beach the Doctor, Rose and Jackie are forced to stay overnight in a small Norway village until they can get home, but something strange is happening in the quiet town.

Authors Note: Boredom strikes again. I guess if you're enjoying the story and like getting updates everyday it's a good thing I'm so bored lately.

Thank you to my amazing beta lj user="mik109" and you're talent for building bridges.

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Jackie stood at the counter of a cozy motel, the same one they had stayed at the last time they were in Norway and had, in fact, been the first one she had laid eyes on too. She fought the urge to tap her foot impatiently as she waited for the clerk to show up so they could check in.

Behind her the Doctor and Rose were talking quietly to one another. How a bunch of dead birds could get the two chatting comfortably the rest of the way into town was beyond her, but she wasn't about to complain. As long as the two of them were talking then everything would turn out alright, not that she had been nervous about that…well not overly nervous at any rate. She had seen that kiss they shared back on the beach.

It wasn't like she was eavesdropping on their conversation, no matter how much she desperately wanted to know every little detail of what was happening. She would have had a perfectly good excuse for hovering nearby and listening in to the three of them considering that she could have been losing her daughter, her only one too, to a parallel world forever at the time. No, she had shown a remarkable amount of self restraint, a feat no one would ever know about too mind you.

One that was lost on everyone, even her in the end, when she turned around to check how things were going and found her daughter pulling the alien, or half alien as it were, into what she could only describe as a thorough snog because if she thought about it too much she was fairly certain her brain would explode.

It was, however, due to that very kiss that she wasn't worried about how the pair would fair in the long run. If her daughter thought enough of him to snog him not even 2 hours after being reunited with him, or 30 minutes since first meeting him if she was to be completely accurate, then he had to be the same man she lost that day at Canary Warf…the one that said goodbye on that dismal beach the first time. And Rose and the Doctor, they'd always be alright she reckoned.

She turned away from the two to stare at the still empty seat behind the counter. Honestly, she knew it wasn't exactly a busy time of year for the small town, what with it being so bloody cold outside, but that didn't mean they should have no service at all.

"How's this for service?" She asked no one in particular. "S'not even that late an' there's no one here."

"Maybe we should try another hotel?" the Doctor offered nonchalantly.

"Don't be daft…this is the only one with anyone that speaks English." Jackie said with an annoyed wave of her hand in his direction. "An' we don't have that blue box of yours to translate everything, not anymore."

"Hey, that's right." Rose said staring at the Doctor as he glared at the back of Jackie's head in, what she was sure, was an attempted to make it explode through just his willpower. "We don't have a TARDIS in this universe an' I can still understand everything you're sayin'."

"Of course you can," he said off handily before giving up his attempts at making Jackie's brain overheat and thus lose the ability to speak for the more worthwhile task of talking to Rose. "I'm speaking English. I've always spoken English to you…had too. The TARDIS doesn't translate Gallifreyian."

"You can speak English?"

"I can speak well over 300 different languages, and English is one of the easier ones so…yes I can speak English." He explained with a small smile. "I never told you that?"

Rose shook her head, her own small smile playing across her face. "I just always figured you were bein' translated."

"Nope" he said, popping the p. "Didn't you ever wonder why the TARDIS didn't translate the writing on the monitors? She always translated any writing we came across but not that." He said taking a moment to look around the small entry they were in. "Well I say every language…she didn't translate that writing on the Sanctuary Base."

"She translated part of it." Rose corrected him with a small smirk.

"I suppose she did." He said with his own smirk, turning to look at Rose again.

"The really cheerful part." She said with a sarcastic nod.

The two shared a smile, lost in their own little joke.

"What did it say?" Jackie butted in, causing them to lose the moment completely.

Both of them stared at Jackie with mixed expressions. Annoyance, confusion, and not a little bit of guilt were mixed in with a slight bit of panic at the question. It wasn't like he could tell her the words "Welcome to Hell" were painted in big, unfriendly, black letters on the wall of a base under the black hole that was acting as the jail cell for Satan. She might start worrying about her daughter traveling with him, not that she didn't before but this would probably take it to a new level, and that wouldn't do. "Ummm…" The Doctor began, searching for a way out of the conversation at hand.

"How can I help you?"

"Finally!" Jackie all but shouted, spinning around to face the concierge and missing the relieved looks the Doctor and Rose shared. "Been waitin' for ages." She muttered quietly, though not quietly enough to be discreet. It was the kind of quiet you use when you don't actually want to be quiet but rather want to let the people around you know how annoyed you are without having to just come out and say it.

"Sorry about the wait." The young woman said, though the sarcasm was lost with the accent. "My Grandmother has been feeling ill, I was just checking on her."

"It's probably this weather you're having." Jackie said with slight concern. "Person can catch their death they stay out in it too long."

The woman nodded as she pulled out a thick leather-bound book with yellowing pages. She laid the book down none too gently in front of Jackie. "Now, how can I help you?"

"We need to check out a few rooms."

The woman nodded, her eyes traveling from Jackie to the Doctor and Rose behind her, and back again. "Two rooms?" she ventured with a small shake of her head.

The two visibly tensed behind Jackie, though she couldn't have known since she was still looking at the woman in front of her. "Three rooms thank you." She answered quickly before turning to look at the two behind her. "Don't know about either of you but I think we could all use some peace and quiet after everything that happened today." She explained, leaving off the whole not wanting to force them into anything they would find uncomfortable so soon after finding each other again bit because there was no way she was sharing a room with Rose...or the Doctor for that matter.

The woman behind the counter nodded, turning to grab three keys off of a board behind her. "Rooms 2a, 2b, and 2d." she explained, sliding the keys over the counter towards Jackie. "They're all upstairs, 2a is the first one on the left side of the hall, and the other two are on the right."

As Jackie reached for a pen so she could sign them in she felt Rose come up next to her and grab two of the keys from the counter. "Why don't you two go on up, I'll only be a mo." Jackie said as she signed into the book the young woman had laid before her.

Rose fiddled with the keys in her hands as she bit her lower lip in thought. "You sure?"

"I'll be fine, go on." Jackie told her reassuringly, shooing her away from the counter. "'m sure you two have plenty you want to talk about without me 'round anyhow." She mumbled to herself as Rose moved towards the stairs, the Doctor following behind her.

The two walked up the stairs together. The silence hung heavily between them. All the unsaid things that would eventually have to be said waiting impatiently for the right time to pop out and make this whole situation real.

"So…" The Doctor started, eyes fixed on his trainers and hands firmly placed in his trouser pockets, the absolute picture of a nervous mess.

"Yeah…" Rose added eyes as equally averted as his were.

"I…" The Doctor began, rocking on his heels, eyes darting around the hall. "Well we…" He amended eyes finally landing on her. "Probably best if we just…ya know…" He said jerking his head towards his room.

"Right, yeah…had a long day." Rose agreed almost too eagerly, thrilled to be getting out of any serious conversation that might have been about to take place.

"Both could do with…a bit of a kip." He finished lamely nodding with her.

"Right." She agreed with an enthusiasm she didn't actually feel, especially not for going to sleep.

"Unless you…" He ventured letting the sentence trail off because he didn't know how that particular sentence was going to end or because he didn't actually want to finish it was anyone's guess.

She mentally cringed at herself for being so daft about the whole thing. They were two adults, two intelligent and strong individuals and they should be dealing with their situation…their very awkward situation…as such. "We can…talk…" She began awkwardly causing him to jerk his head back in her direction abruptly. "Ya know…'bout everything, in the morning."

"Right…course we can." He agreed nodding his head more vigorously then completely necessary.

"It's just…this is all new and a little bit awkward." Rose began to explain.

"Yeah I…I suppose it is."

"S'not like this kind of thing happens every day." She tried to say in a light tone, one she failed at just slightly since it came out as more nervous than light. He gave her a weak grin for her trouble.

"I just need a bit…" she began to explain.

"You can have all the bit you want." he assured her whole heartedly, unintentionally cutting off her explanation, eager to let her know that he would wait however long it took for her to come to terms with what had happened. It wasn't until a few seconds later that he realized what he had said, and when it did his face scrunched up in both confusion and disbelief. "That…that sounded better in my head."

She nodded in understanding, glad he was taking this as well as he was, especially considering that if their roles were swapped she'd probably be a wreck. She glanced down to the key in her hand and then back towards her door. "I guess this is goodnight then." She said biting her thumb nail nervously. She gave him a small smile before she turned to go into her room, mentally berating herself for falling into her old nervous habit of biting her nails.

"It's just…" He began, making her look back over her shoulder to stare at him. "I'm sorry."

"For what?"

"We tricked you into staying here."

"We?" Rose turned back towards him completely now.

"Me and him. Well, me. The other me." The Doctor tugged on his ear, refusing to look at Rose as his sudden bout of truthfulness took hold of him. "I knew what he was going to do... Well I figured… When we landed on the beach, I knew he was planning on leaving me here with you... I knew he would vanish the first chance he got, and that he wouldn't exactly give you much of a chance to make up your own mind." He chanced a glance at her. "He pushed me on you, tried to use that amazing loyalty you have, and that heart of yours, to guilt you into staying...or at the very least to distract you long enough for him to sneak away." His gaze skittered away from her as her face became an unreadable mask that happened to frighten him more than it probably should have all things considered. "And I helped." He finished quietly.

Rose's unreadable mask finally broke with his last comment. "What?" She asked with just a touch of anger in her voice.

"You kissed me." He cut her off quickly, "but that doesn't mean I wouldnt've done the same thing to distract you from him." He gave a self deprecating grin as the words left his mouth. "I just want you...and I would have done anything to get you. But… You didn't choose me, Rose. He chose for you... I chose for you, and I'm sorry. I am so sorry. You deserve so much more than that, than me."

Rose shook her head a little even though she wasn't entirely sure what she meant by it. "Doctor."

"But I am him." He said firmly continuing on full force. "I'm the same man and I need you to know that and if I don't say this now I probably never will and… I think it's something I need to say." He continued to explain, the key to his room clutched so tightly in his hand it would probably have drawn blood if it weren't so old and worn.

"I'm the one who lost you. I'm the one who lived everyday knowing I couldn't save you. Me." He began eyes fixed on her now. "I had to listen to the beast talk about how you were going to die. I'm the one who watched you get pulled towards the Void. I'm the one who thought I had lost you to hell because I couldn't save you." He all but choked out, his voice barely above a whisper.

"I'm the one who burnt up a sun to say goodbye, and I'm the one who didn't get to tell you how I felt on that beach the first time and…" He continued his voice still a little shaky, something he was not at all familiar with. He had always been in such control of his emotions before, and part of him desperately hoped he would learn to do that again, even if he was part human now.

"I'm the one who ran to you on that street today and I'm the one who got shot by a Dalek...me…" He explained, a strange lump beginning to form in his throat as he left off the part about how he was also the one who had to listen to her tell another him how he wasn't really him even though he was.

It was refreshing to know he had enough common sense in this human version of himself to not go down that particularly sticky road.

The two stood in the hallway for a long moment, neither one able to look away from the other as the reality of what the Doctor had just said settled over them. He had just bared his soul to her, or bore as much as he had ever revealed before, and neither of them knew what to do next.

"Goodnight." The Doctor abruptly stated before turning away from Rose, jamming his key into the door handle and slipping inside as quickly as possible.

~TBC (possibly tomorrow at the rate I'm going)


	4. Chapter 4

Title: Into the Woods (4/20)  
Pairing: TenII/Rose  
Rating: PG  
Genre: Romance, drama, action/adventure (eventually)  
Spoilers: Just to be safe let's say everything up to JE.  
Disclaimer: I don't own them and I make no money off of them (if anything it's the other way around)  
Summary: After being left on the beach the Doctor, Rose and Jackie are forced to stay overnight in a small Norway village until they can get home, but something strange is happening in the quiet town.

Authors Note: Inclimate weather = no school which does nothing to help my boredom. I will warn you that the next 3 chapters (including this one) involve more drama _but_ after that we get to go back to action/adventure (huzzah!)

Thank you to my amazing beta **mik109** and you're talent for building bridges.

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Jackie happily made her way up the narrow staircase towards her room, eager to fall into the bed and curl up under the covers. She utterly refused to be bothered with another important thought until sometime the next day, and late into it if she had any choice in the matter. As she neared the top of the staircase, she saw her daughter standing in front of what she assumed was her room, staring at the door to what she again assumed was the Doctor's room.

Well, there went her plan about not thinking.

"What's wrong, sweetheart?" she asked softly, not wanting to startle Rose with her sudden appearance. Sure the stairs creaked something awful as she walked up them, but Rose was in a whole other universe, and Jackie was fairly certain she knew which one.

"D'you ever feel guilty about it?" Rose asked without turning away from the Doctor's door. "About being with Pete?"

"Whatchya mean?"

"I mean..." She said turning to look at her mother, her eyes a little glossy but Jackie couldn't tell if that was from being tired or something else. "He lost his wife, and you lost Dad...an' now you're together. You ever feel guilty 'bout bein' with him 'cause he's not Dad, but he is." She explained leaning back against the door to her room. "It's like...it's like you're cheating on him somehow, that you're settlin' for second best because the real thing isn't here."

Jackie nodded a little. She knew exactly where this was coming from and she had asked the same questions herself when she had first been stranded in a parallel world with a man who was, but wasn't, the one she was in love with. "No. I don't feel guilty 'bout it, 'cause I'm not settling for second best." She said with far more certainty than she had felt when she had first made that decision. "Your Dad died a long time ago and I knew I would never love anyone else the way I loved him, an' you know what? I was right."

"But don't you ever feel like it's wrong?"

"Your Dad would've wanted me to be happy, and he would be thrilled to know the only man who can make me happy is him...even if it's a parallel world version of him." She explained as Rose looked away from her. "But you don't think that, I know we aren't talkin' about me. Rose, what happened with me an' Pete...it's different than what's happened with you an' the Doctor."

"Pete isn't your father. He looks like him and he talks like him and he can act like him, but he isn't. Pete isn't the man I married and he's not your Dad. He isn't the man who forgot my name at our wedding, or the one who almost fainted when I told him I was pregnant, or the one I argued with for hours because I refused to let him name you after his great Aunt Beatrix because that's just a horrible name," she said as Rose laughed slightly, "and he's not the man who ran out of the church that day just to get hit by a car to save the world. But you know what? The man who stayed with you on the beach today, that is the Doctor."

Rose shook her head, eyes falling to the floor. "But he's still out there...in another world, all by himself."

Jackie took a moment to appraise her daughter, to take a long hard look at her. It was her job as a mother to comfort her, to help her make the difficult decisions, at least the ones she asked for help on, but she had no idea what to tell her at that moment. This went way beyond anything she ever had to deal with when she was Rose's age and, while she did have a bit of experience thanks to her relationship with Pete, it really wasn't the same. So Jackie did the only thing she could think of and she told her daughter exactly what she would have wanted to hear, exactly what her Mum thought.

"That was always gonna happen Rose, even if you went with him. It's part of what living for hundreds of years means I'd imagine. You find people you care about and, eventually, they leave."

"Mum, I don't know what to do." She said meekly.

"Rose, far as I can tell the only difference between this him and that him, other than the color of their suits, is that this one can spend forever with you." She started, happy to see Rose look up at her again. "It's not easy. It isn't going to be. You just have to realize you fell in love with the man he is, and he's still that man. You're never gonna stop loving the him in another universe, just like I never stopped lovin' your dad, but it gets better. Trust me, I know. It takes time and you just have to take it slow, but, eventually, you're going to fine. Both of you will be."

Rose nodded a little, eyes slightly glazed over in thought.

Her daughter was obviously miles away again so Jackie decided to take matters into her own hands. With a deep breath, she affected the best fake yawn she could muster, which just-so-happened to turn into a real yawn halfway through. "Well, I'm knackered." She said with more emphasis on the word I'm than she had originally intended. "How 'bout we turn in? Just finished saving all of reality so you know the world will be here when we wake up." She said with a smile towards her daughters departing back. "Sleep well, sweetheart, and remember jus'…jus' take things slow. Everything will turn out."

Rose bit her lip a little, glancing over her shoulder at her mother. "Yeah, thanks, Mum."

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The Doctor shut the door behind him as softly as he could while simultaneously trying to close it as quickly as possible.

"What was that?!" he groaned out quietly to himself, wincing at how ridiculous he had just been.

Goodnight? Really?! That's how he chose to finish that particular…whatever that was that he was doing. Oh, what had he been doing? Was he baring his soul to her, his brand new one that shared a whole lot in common with his old one, or just the old one because the new one was so new it didn't need any baring?

Either way ending a bit of a speech about who he was, who he really was, whether soul baring or not, to the woman he loved and lost and then got back should never have been ended with, 'Goodnight' and him…in effect…running away.

He hoped all of this was the human hormones playing tricks with his mind, and by playing tricks, he meant making it turn off completely for long periods of time which allowed his mouth to just go off and say anything it felt needed saying. Verbal diarrhea was not a good look for him, not when it didn't involve saving the universe with complex equations or sharing with others interesting historical and or extraterrestrial facts.

What he really hoped though, more than being able to wave everything off tomorrow or possibly in a few days (please, oh please let it be tomorrow) as being him getting used to his new body, was that he iwould/i get used to it. He honestly wasn't sure he'd be able to live with himself if he continued making a fool of himself like he had been, especially if he was going to continue on like this forever.

He stomped further into his room, flipping on the lamp that decorated the end table. He glanced around the room quickly, and then did a double take to fully note the very beastly wallpaper of the room he was in. He had been in his fair share of motel rooms, and none of them ever had very nice wallpaper, but this might have taken it to a new level.

At least the rest of the room wasn't as ghastly. In fact, it was rather nice. Cozy even. The whole motel, save the aforementioned wallpaper, gave off a rather cozy feel, he thought as he continued his inner interior decorator interlude. He was in no way trying to ignore anything else more pressing, especially not the little impulse in the back of his mind to go next door and tell Rose he was oh so very sorry for effectively shattering any sort of comfortable camaraderie they had begun to build up by being so bloody awkward just now.

He groaned again, closing his eyes against his ridiculously overactive thoughts, and the wallpaper obviously, and turned to hit his head against the wall.

Oh, life was easier on the TARDIS, he mused. He could just muck about with whatever system happened to not be working correctly at the moment, or at least gone for a long walk to clear his head. Instead he was stuck there, in one miserably small room…no escape…no TARDIS, ever.

He leaned back against the wall and wondered, and not for the first time that day, if the other him had really thought it would be that easy? That just dropping him off in Pete's World with Rose would make any problems he might face just disappear. Or maybe he thought he wouldn't mind them as much because she was there.

He was a brand new man who had just had this whole life pulled out from under him in a matter of seconds. He didn't even know how he felt about it, let alone if he was going to be okay with it.

Did he even want to keep living that life? One adventure after another didn't really leave room for that human life he'd always been curious about and even desperately wanted when he had been traveling with Rose.

He knew he'd never live a normal human life. He'd get bored within the first week, no doubt. But he did wonder if he wouldn't like being able to settle down in the sense that he stayed in one place for the rest of his life, at least relatively. Besides, Rose worked at Torchwood, so could he too and that was bound to give him enough excitement for the rest of his now human length life.

He also wondered if the other him honestly thought he didn't know what was happening to Donna. He knew what having all of the thoughts of a Time Lord would do to Donna's mind, and he knew what he would do if he was faced with the same dilemma.

Poor Donna. She didn't deserve that.

He was also fairly certain that if he ever did tell Rose just what happened to Donna once the two of them had gotten back to their own universe she would never forgive him. Either of him. Which left him in a very uncomfortable position. He could go on lying to her for the rest of their lives, or he could tell her the truth.

Neither option seemed like a very good choice, but disclosing that wee anecdote right in the middle, after allowing them time to adjust to their new lives before bringing up the subject, seemed like an even worse choice. No, that particular conversation would have to be done quickly, like pulling off a bandaid, or not done at all.

Unfortunately, choosing to not tell her at all would probably lead to him blurting it out at some completely inconvenient moment like in the middle of saving the universe, or while they were sharing a quiet moment over tea.

He just wasn't sure he could handle her hating him right now, especially after what he had done.

Yes, the Daleks would have destroyed the galaxy, reality bomb or no, that many of them could have easily taken over the entire universe, all of reality if they tried hard enough. They'd already proven, time and time again, the only thing they were ever content with doing was destroying everything. Which really just begs the question why destroy all of reality if all you like doing is exterminating people? Wouldn't you get bored?

In the end, he had done what he had too so the universe could be safe again. So why did it feel so wrong?

The other him left him in this world because he couldn't be trusted, because he had committed genocide. He knew this was the other him's way of trying to convince himself and Rose that he had to be there, just like he knew he wasn't the same as he had been after the Time War.

He wasn't too far off though.

There was a gnawing feeling in the pit of his stomach, and it didn't seem to be going anywhere any time soon. He was fairly certain this feeling was guilt, and it was all Dalek Cann's fault. All those years ago, when the Time Lords had sent him back to destroy the Daleks before they could ever become a threat and he had failed on purpose, he had done so because of Daleks like him.

They were a brilliant race, if a bit violent even before the Time War, but he couldn't hold that against them. He never held it against humans. He saw so much potential in them back then, potential they still had…and he had just destroyed them all. Again.

He was torn at the moment. He felt guilty for what he'd done to the Daleks because they had proven, at least a few of them had, that they could learn and change, and he had wiped them out of existence with a few flipped switches. He felt angry because a fully Time Lord version of himself had dumped him in a parallel world because he didn't trust him, and he felt even more guilty about being left here because he had just been handed the life he'd always wanted on a silver platter.

On top of all of that, he was confused because his brain and the rest of this body didn't seem to want to work together, and he was annoyed at himself for acting like a bit of a moron all evening. The biggest problem was that he just didn't know what he should do about Rose, and that bothered him the most.

Should he pluck up some of that legendary Time Lord courage and go next door to finish the conversation he had started in the hallway, only this time end it the right way? Most important of all should he tell her about Donna or should he leave it alone because it wasn't his story to share with her, not anymore at least.

He gave his head another little whack against the wall and desperately wished everything would just make sense again.

~TBC

(AN2: Secret confession? I like the blue suit.)


	5. Chapter 5

Title: Into the Woods (5/20)  
Pairing: TenII/Rose  
Rating: PG  
Genre: Romance, drama, action/adventure (eventually)  
Spoilers: Just to be safe let's say everything up to JE.  
Disclaimer: I don't own them and I make no money off of them (if anything it's the other way around)  
Summary: After being left on the beach the Doctor, Rose and Jackie are forced to stay overnight in a small Norway village until they can get home, but something strange is happening in the quiet town.  
Authors Note: Wow I don't actually have one this time.

Thank you to my amazing beta **mik109** and you're talent for building bridges.

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Rose shut the door behind her with a quiet click that seemed to echo in the tiny and deathly silent room around her. She took a few steps into the room and took a moment to look around. It was almost identical to the one she had stayed in last time she noted, taking in the small differences of the paintings which adorned the walls and the different shade of blue which made up the bed linens. Maybe they were new and all of the rooms had similar blue bed linens now.

She bit her bottom lip a little, briefly wondering how long she could wonder about the differences of the room and thus keep her mind from straying to anything more important or even remotely Doctor related.

She groaned to herself and leaned against the wall behind her, eyes fixed out on the rest of her room, leveling a glare at the apparently mandatory horrid wallpaper that lined the walls. Yup, that hadn't changed any.

Why did this have to be so hard? She realized it really shouldn't be nearly as hard as she was making it, and she briefly wondered if she was making it harder on herself because she knew she would feel even guiltier otherwise, even if only just a little.

With another self suffering sigh, she turned her head towards the small end table next to her and considered flipping the lamp on. Outside, it was leaning more towards the night rather than dusk which meant everything was cast in a dark bluish haze.

She decided maybe she liked the dark, even after working so hard to stop the Darkness, if only just a little.

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He pressed his forehead against the cool smooth wall of his room, his eyes shooting open at the muffled sound of a door shutting on the other side.

Rose was on the other side of this very wall.

He could almost feel her through all of the wood and plaster and the rather unattractive wallpaper and it gave him a slight bit of déjà vu, but only for a moment.

There had been another time, two long years ago, when he had stood similarly to this, when he had been able to feel her even through a wall, a wall that had consisted of considerably more than this particular wall.

The wall of an entire universe had stood between them, then.

He let out a short sigh and closed his eyes against the brightness of the lone lamp he had turned on. What was he doing? He turned away from the wall but couldn't seem to get himself to step away from it, away from her, so he decided to lean against it.

He was a Time Lord, or rather a Human-Time Lord metacrisis, and no self respecting Time Lord, or any Human-Time Lord metacrisis for that matter, would be sitting alone in a small, albeit cozy, motel room in some small, and not so cozy, Norwegian town when right next door was the love of his life similarly alone. Not when all this Human-Time Lord metacrisis wanted to do was say 'sod it' to having any sort of adjustment period and just be with her, if for no other reason than to really prove to himself this wasn't some sort of bizarre fairytale ending he dreamt up for himself.

He decided that even he wasn't mad enough to have come up with this sort of situation for himself.

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It was strange to think that he was right next door after everything they had been through. Rose shifted a little, moving to press more of herself against the wall behind her and closer to where she knew he was.

She breathed out another, tiny sigh and rested the side of her face against the cool wall behind her, the thought of Canary Warf jumping to the forefront of her mind for a second. That was the last time she had felt this close and yet this far away from him.

It had been infinitely worse in that control room, than when he had said goodbye to her that first time on the beach. Seeing him standing before her was one thing, but feeling him like he was right there was another.

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The Doctor took a small step back from the wall, letting his hands linger on its surface as he considered his options.

He could lie down on, what at least looked like a rather comfortable bed, and try to convince his ever working mind to take a break long enough for his very human body to get some sleep. He blew out an annoyed breath. He knew he would probably just end up lying on top of the covers glaring at the textured ceiling above him and fall into a very foul mood due to the lack of the sleeping he needed to be doing.

Or, he could act like the Time Lord Rose had fallen in love with and be brave and face danger head on. He could square his shoulders and go next door, and, well, he hadn't exactly gotten far enough to think about what came after going next door. No, he was rather caught up in the working up the courage to Igo/I next door in the first place.

He groaned to himself and let his head fall back so he could start that glaring at the ceiling part of option one, just to see how he felt while doing it because option one was still on the table.

"This is ridiculous." He said to himself, shaking his head once as if that would make every thought in his head snap into place and just start making sense.

The Doctor pushed off of the wall gently as he started to move towards the door. He froze suddenly, unable to make his legs take him any farther towards the door and he was only halfway there, which basically amounted to a total of three steps taken.

With a groan, he turned back and took the five steps necessary to safely seat himself on the edge of the bed. He rubbed a hand on the back of his next as he fixed the door of his room with a rather appraising glare.

"Stupid bloody legs, stupid human hormones…" he grumbled to himself darkly as he continued to glare at the door of his room.

He shook his head again and stood up quickly, starting to make his way to the door once again. He had made up his mind. He was going to go next door and talk. He didn't care what they talked about, just so long as they were both talking, with each other. All he had to do was get out of his room and knock on her door.

He didn't get that far.

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Rose sighed a little, the back of her head pressed against the cool surface of the wall. She shifted against it slightly, the feeling of him right next to her slowly fading away.

Oh, her mind was playing tricks on her now. Maybe her mum was right and she should just go to sleep, let her mind rest for a bit. It wasn't like she had given it the chance to, not since she had finally made it to her old universe. Not since she got the dimension cannon to actually work really.

She gave the bed to her left a long hard look, barely able to make the lines of it out in the dark of her room. She leaned forward and finally switched on the lamp.

The bed looked more inviting when it was dark she decided as she walked over to it and fell in. She rolled onto her back and stared at the ceiling of the room. She rubbed her hands across her face and stubbornly decided that she would get some sleep, even if her mind was still racing. That thought firmly in place, she rolled over onto her side, her eyes fixed on the door of her room.

Yup, she'd be asleep any second now.

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There it was the door to her room. He stood only a few inches away from it, easily within knocking distance even if his hands were both firmly rooted to his sides. Just knock, he told himself firmly, eyes fixed on the door before him. He lifted his hand but couldn't seem to make it move much more than that.

He should just be glad he had finally made it out of his own room. It only took five attempts. Why he thought getting himself to actually knock on her door would be any easier was beyond him. He groaned as his hand fell to his side once again. He glared down at the betraying appendage. Sure he had been born out of that hand, but that didn't mean he couldn't glare at it and curse its inability to perform a simple function like knocking.

The door opened quite suddenly and a great deal quicker than he had anticipated. Granted, he hadn't anticipated it opening at all so the mere fact that it opened meant it opened quicker than he had anticipated it would. His head shot up, shock and maybe just the very slightest bit of embarrassment obvious on his face.

"Rose…"

"Doctor…"

"I was just…the thing is…umm…" oh good, he was still awkward. That meant this wasn't some kind of bad dream he would be waking up from any second now, lovely. "I couldn't sleep," he finished lamely, turning his eyes so he could look at anything but her because looking her in the eye was more than he could possibly handle at the moment. They settled on the small expanse of wall visible behind her. At least, she had the same horrible wallpaper in her room.

"Well, I say I couldn't, I probably could. I haven't ever slept in this body after all and I'm not all Time Lord now so I'm sure I'll need it. Well I'm mostly sure, about 90%…well 80%…definitely at least 75% sure. Thing is whether my body needs sleep or not doesn't really matter because I'm still all Time Lord where it counts," he continued quickly as he knocked his fist against the side of his head to emphasis his point, "and, frankly, just lying in there, my mind starts to wander and it's never good to let that go on too long…"

"So you're just…" he silently thanked her for cutting him off as she looked up at him, her hand still clutching her doorknob. "Goin' for a walk then?" she asked a little meekly, probably because she just woke up from a much needed rest he decided.

He finally managed to meet her eyes, and his mouth opened as if he wanted to say something but quickly returned to its unhelpful closed position. His eyes fell down to his feet again, and he sighed. "No, I…" he took a deep breath and was a little impressed with himself for not groaning at how jittery he found himself around her. He looked up at the ceiling of the motel and started to talk again. "I wanted to…" he clamped his mouth shut and shook his head slightly, yes definitely jittery. He silently cursed his new human hormones once again before squaring his shoulders and again meeting Rose's eyes. "I needed…" he gulped slightly "I needed to…"

He was finally, blissfully, cut off by Rose who had decided throwing herself into his arms was the best course of action.

She wrapped one of her arms around his middle and clutched his maroon t-shirt in the other like her life depended on never letting go of it. Her face was buried in his chest and her whole body was tense against his.

His arms instantly went around her, holding her tight to him and he happily buried his nose into her sleep mussed hair. He squeezed her a little tighter in a feeble attempt at a hug, which would have worked out brilliantly had he not been holding her as tight as he possibly could prior to his decision to give her the hug. He breathed her in and seriously considered the ramifications of never letting her go.

"Don't."

His eyes shot open. He was fairly certain he had only thought that last bit and hadn't actually said it out loud. "What?"

"Don't go," she explained to him. He shook his head a little in complete confusion at her comment, something she probably just felt since her face was still comfortably buried against his chest. "Jus'…jus' stay okay?" she asked quietly, finally letting go of his shirt so she could wrap her other arm around his middle. "Stay here."

"Why would I ever leave?" he asked just as quietly as he squeezed her body closer to his once more.

She grinned against his chest and shook her head slightly. "No, I mean now…tonight," she pulled her head back just enough to look up to his face, brown eyes fixed on brown. "Stay."

"Rose…" he began again, his single human heart clenching at the way her voice shook.

"I just don't want to let go of you right now," she explained pillowing her head against his chest again, "Okay?"

The Doctor dropped his nose back to the crown of her head and took another deep breath, letting the warm comforting smell of her wash away everything else. "Okay."

~TBC


	6. Chapter 6

Title: Into the Woods (6/20)  
Pairing: TenII/Rose  
Rating: PG  
Genre: Romance, drama, action/adventure (eventually)  
Spoilers: Just to be safe let's say everything up to JE.  
Disclaimer: I don't own them and I make no money off of them (if anything it's the other way around)  
Summary: After being left on the beach the Doctor, Rose and Jackie are forced to stay overnight in a small Norway village until they can get home, but something strange is happening in the quiet town.  
Authors Note: Two updates in one day? I really am just avoiding my homework now aren't I? This is it, the last chapter before that genre spot up there changes. The eventually is coming off and the action/adventure will be moving to the front come tomorrow!

Thank you to my amazing beta **mik109** and you're talent for building bridges.

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The Doctor was lying on his side, head propped up on his arm, as he stared over at Rose. He wasn't going to deny how the shuffling which ensued after he agreed to stay with her for the night wasn't at least a little comical. She had only asked him to not go anywhere. She never mentioned he couldn't let go of her and letting go of her would have made the whole thing a lot easier so he only had himself to blame for that. But still, they were both there, on the bed staring at each other and talking quietly about nothing of any real importance. Oh, those big important issues dangled over their heads to be sure. They were iboth/i just choosing to ignore them.

"So, what's different here?"

Her face scrunched up in confusion at his question, a look he probably found far more adorable than he should have. "Whaddya mean?"

"Well, alternate universe, things are bound to be a bit different. What was the first thing you noticed that was different?" he asked with a small grin. Her eyes clouded over with sadness for a brief, blink and you'll miss it kind of moment. One he hadn't missed. "Besides the obvious," he added quickly.

"The obvious..." she trailed off, all signs of sadness completely gone now.

"Like, oh, I don't know. Zeppelins and your Dad and...being rich, you're rich," he said, the fact suddenly dawning on him. "What's that like?"

A slow grin spread across her face and she nodded to herself. "It's not bad."

"Do you have maids?"

"Mum and Pete have maids, yeah," she answered, eyes moving to the comforter they were laying on top of. She played with a stray thread absentmindedly as she answered him.

"Chauffeur?" he asked with something similar to a wicked grin.

"No."

"What?"

"No," she explained a little surprised by his outright shock at the information, "I am perfectly capable of driving myself wherever I need to go."

"Course you are," he said, smiling at her again. "Are you famous?"

"Oh, God," she buried her face in the pillow. Couldn't he ask her anything else? The last thing she wanted to discuss was her unexpected rise to fame as the mysterious Peter Tyler's long lost daughter. "It's so annoying," she finished, her answer muffled by the pillow.

"It can't be that bad," he began, earning himself a glare from Rose as she moved away from the pillow.

"It's horrible. I don't feel like I ever get any privacy, and everyone is always trying to figure out who I really am," she began to explain. "The people even demanded that a DNA test was done on me to prove I was really the daughter of Peter and Jackie Tyler," his face scrunched up in his best attempt at empathizing with her. "Mum didn't like that idea much."

"Can't say I blame her."

"Yeah, well, a mysterious new daughter no one knew about suddenly showing up was a bit suspect. No one wanted to take any chances. Course even after the test they still didn't believe it," he frowned as she continued to stare at him. "What about you?"

"Me? Oh, I'm not famous," he answered her with a detached wave of his hand.

"No," she giggled a little. Oh god, did she really just giggle? She hadn't done that in ages. "No, I meant what about you?"

"What about me?"

"Brand new you…you regenerated right? I mean, a metacrisis is still kind of like a regeneration isn't it? What's the first thing you noticed that's different?"

"Oh," he said a little taken off guard, "nothing really. Well, nothing I've noticed so far. Bit more…hormonal…probably just getting used to my new human physiology. Did you know that Time Lords are, at least to the eye, the same physically as a human?"

"Are they?"

"Yup," he answered happily, popping the p as he often did. "Biggest difference as far as I can tell is I only have one heart," he said as Rose gently placed her hand against his chest, feeling the steady thump of his single heart.

"It's strange to think how all of the blood in my body has to be pumped around, down from my chest and into my legs and back up and through my arms and to my head and I've only got one heart to do it with," he explained the two of them moving ever so slightly closer together as he prattled on about his new human circulatory system. "I'll need to eat more bananas," he suddenly blurted breaking any kind of moment that might have been building.

Rose's hand fell back to the bed and she leaned away from him. "Why would you need to do that? How could you do that?"

He leveled an even stare at Rose choosing to ignore her baffled amusement at the idea of him eating even more bananas and instead focusing on the why. "Potassium regulates the heart, and I need to have good Potassium levels now that I've only got the one heart doing everything I'm used to two hearts doing. Can't chance it."

She bit her bottom lip as she studied him. "So, other than regulating your heart, anything else you're worried about?" she asked him a lighthearted teasing way.

"Well, how old am I?"

"You're worried about how old you are?"

"Well, not worried, more curious," he explained, staring at the wall just past her shoulder, totally lost in thought. "How old am I? Am I still over 900 years old? Or am I one day old? Or am I as old as I look? How old do I look? Mid 30's? Can't be more than mid 30's…Or, oh! Am I three?" he finished a little triumphantly, giving her a small grin.

"How could you be three?"

"I grew out of the hand I lost on Christmas," he explained, holding his hand up in the small space between the two of them and wiggled his fingers at her. "I lost this hand three years ago, or possibly two…Either way means my hand is three, or two, maybe the rest of me is that old too?" he explained as he stared at the back of his hairy manly hand.

"Three or two?"

Her question snapped him out of his revere. "One year didn't happen for Earth, well most of Earth anyhow."

Rose nodded, her eyes locked onto the hand he was still holding up in front of her. "So, how're you gonna figure out how old you are? Because, if you're only three, this might be a little awkward."

"Yes, because, if I'm over 900, it isn't?" he said letting his hand fall back to the bed.

"I don't mind if you're over 900."

"I mind," he told her quickly, eyes locked on hers. "...a little..." he amended earning himself another grin. He rather liked it when she grinned at him like that. "Besides, I don't look three."

"You don't look 900."

"No, I defiantly do not look 900," he agreed quickly. "I did once," he began fighting back the urge to shudder, "It was disturbing. I had to live in a bird cage," she laughed a little at that. "Don't laugh it's true…It was horrible."

"Maybe you can be seventeen," she grinned at him, choosing to leave behind what seemed to be a bit of a bad memory and bring the focus back onto the two of them relaxing together. "You'll be old enough to get your license then."

"I'd never pass the test," he said simply, choosing to take her cue and ignore how she was changing the subject away from anything remote related to the Master. It was a sore subject to be sure and it never ceased to amaze him how good she was at reading him. "I never passed the one for flying the TARDIS. Why bother with a car?"

"I'll have to drive you around then. Be your chauffeur," she said with a grin, her tongue poking out from between her teeth. He beamed at her, enjoying the funny way his stomach flipped when she smiled at him like that. "Or Mum can," he cringed at that thought, any and all hints of the smile he had sported only three words earlier completely gone.

"Don't even joke about that," his almost pained face made Rose laugh lightly, which was enough to make him grin again.

"But what happens if you have to go somewhere and I'm not there to take you?" she asked with a fake concern.

"I'll walk," he answered dejectedly, fixing her with a downtrodden pout. "Or find someone else to take me. Anyone else…" he said eyes wide in fear at the idea of not being able to find anyone else to take him where he needed to go. "On the other hand, maybe I'll just make sure I pass the test."

They laid there for a moment just looking at each other, perfectly content to remain quiet. Then Rose took a deep breath and asked the question she wasn't certain she really wanted the answer to.

"Are you going to miss it? Travelin'?" she asked quietly, eyes darting back down to the comforter, anything to not have to look at him and see the loss she was sure would be there with his answer.

"Do you mean will I miss meeting important historical figures and visiting other galaxies?" he asked ducking his head so he could catch her downcast eyes. "No."

Her eyes jumped back up to his, her head still tilted down to the bed. "No?"

He gave her a little lopsided grin. "I've lived that life for hundreds of years, Rose. I want a new adventure," he told her, just barely holding back the urge to cup her face in his hands and convince her of it. "I'll miss the TARDIS. Of course, I will. But there are so many things I want to do that I could never do before while I was out flitting about all of time and space. Things I can do now, with you."

Rose blushed. So the Doctor, ever the gentleman, searched for a slightly less intimate subject to begin. He frowned at the subject which popped into his brain.

"Besides I'm too dangerous to be left on my own."

"No, you aren't."

"Aren't I? I just destroyed a whole species with a flip of a switch. What makes you think I won't do it again?"

"If you are the same as when I first met you, and I'm not convinced you are, even then you were savin' the world. So, of course you're gonna keep doin' it. You're a hero. You can't help that. 'Sides, even if you weren't…you've got me now. I wouldn't let you do that."

"Rose Tyler," he whispered out, his hand gently cupping the side of her face, "you'd save a genocidal maniac?"

"Yeah, well it takes one to know one."

"You aren't…you never were."

"Yeah, an' neither are you. So stop acting like it."

"There are so many things I should tell you…I ineed/i to tell you," he said, gently dragging the pad of his thumb across her cheek bone. "And all I want to do is kiss you again," he told her, his eyes never leaving her own. "But you need a bit," he grumbled, letting his hand fall away from her face as a slow grin worked its way across it at the words she had used earlier, "and they're things I need to say before this goes any further."

"Then tell me."

His one heart seemed to skip a beat at the same time his stomach did another one of those delicious flops at the eagerness in her voice. An eagerness he very much hoped was in regards to the idea of kissing him again and not necessarily the openness he had recently acquired. He wondered if this current penchant for baring his soul had anything to do with Donna or just the combination of a very extreme day, his overwrought emotions and a tiredness he had never felt before. He sincerely hoped it was the latter. "I'm the same man I was before."

"I know that," she was quick to counter, her own hand moving to cup his face, her fingers playing in the hair at his temple.

He squeezed his eyes shut and leaned into her hand. It was an intimate gesture neither of them would have afforded before. One he couldn't imagine letting go of now even if he had only just gotten it. The whole moment, with both of them lying so close together, stealing little touches here and there instead of looks because they were sharing looks quite openly as it was, was a luxury he never would have allowed himself before.

He breathed out a heavy sigh into the palm of her hand. His eyes closed in either thought or pleasure. She couldn't quite tell. "Please…" he whispered against her hand, his warm breath sending goosebumps up her arm. "I need to finish," He said, eyes slowly opening to lock onto hers.

She nodded to him as he kissed the palm of her hand, his own snaking out to softly wrap around her wrist as she let her hand fall away from his face.

"We're the same man, Rose, and I love you," her heart seemed to stop completely as he said the words. It was the second time he had said it, but this was no whisper on the beach. This was a bold statement of fact. She couldn't help but hope she got to hear him say it more often.

"I do," he reasserted the point. It was an important point after all. "And that means he's in love with you too. You know he is," he explained. She began to shake her head to let him know he didn't have to tell her this, that they had been doing fine so far and talks like this could wait until much, much, later. He gave her a hard look which told her he wasn't done and she had said she would let him finish.

"The thing is, just because he's in love with you, it doesn't mean he could ever let himself love you."

Her face scrunched up in that adorably confused way again and part of him desperately wanted to just ignore the rest of this conversation he had suddenly felt was so important he simply had to share it that very moment. Bloody Donna and her need to discuss feelings and for seemingly giving him that same damnable trait.

"I told you once before how you could spend the rest of your life with me but I couldn't spend mine with you," he said eyes carefully diverted from her. "I lied. I said that because I had to convince myself that was really the case," he slowly looked up into her face, a little surprised to see nothing more than the confusion. He had expected anger and maybe a little hurt, not just confusion.

"I've had time to think about it and I've spent a lot of time thinking about it, more time than I'd like to admit, and I know I never would have been with you before because I know that losing you, really losing you, would kill me. A Time Lord regenerates, but we don't have too…and if we were together and I lost you, I wouldn't regenerate, because I wouldn't want to live without you.

"There was this time, when I was still traveling with Martha, that I was happy you weren't with me anymore. There were these aliens who were hunting us, the Family of Blood, and I used the chameleon circuit, it's a device on the TARDIS, to hide from them…it made me human. For three whole months, I was a normal human man. I didn't remember a thing about being a Time Lord. I had little glimpses of it…my real life…but I thought they were dreams or figments of an overactive imagination. Everything that made me a Time Lord was hidden away in a fob watch. I couldn't really remember anything about me but I remembered you.

"After I had gotten my memories back, I realized how happy I was you weren't there. You had worked your way so deep into my mind and my heart by then I knew that if you were still with me I wouldn't have opened that watch. I would have stayed human and lived out my own little happily ever after with you. I wouldn't have really been me, and you might have had something to say about that, but it wouldn't matter because I could give you forever then.

"It wouldn't matter how I was with you, because either way I'd choose you. If we had been together, if I had been with you the way I wanted to be with you, I would have had to turn my back on the universe. And I would have, gladly.

"In well over 900 years, I've never loved anyone the way I love you, but the universe needs the Doctor, Last of the Time Lords. It's who he is and it's what he does. He has to keep the universe from breaking, and he has to do it on his own."

"Why are you telling me all of this?" Rose asked, and to her credit she didn't sound angry, or resentful, or even overly sad by any of what he was saying which gave him a great deal of hope and a slightly more optimistic view on where the conversation was going.

"Because I need you to know why he did what he did," he explained almost nervously, "Why I did what I did. I need you to understand I just wanted you to have a fantastic life. You're the one who proved time and time again that you wouldn't do that without me. You chose me. Every time, you chose me. So I did the only thing I could think of and I gave you me."

"He let go of you so you could have the life I always wanted you to have… So I could have the life I always wanted to have with you. I'm not a lesser him. I'm all of him. I'm everything he could never have given you but always wanted to. And I ineed/i you to know that. I ineed/i you to know that I'm still me, and that he's going to be okay. He'll be able to move on and you don't have to worry about him anymore."

She lifted her hand up again and placed it back on his cheek as he kept his eyes locked on her. "You're my Doctor. You always will be," she said with a weak grin. "Besides, I never thought he would leave me stuck in a parallel universe, with no way back to him, if you weren't him…because you'd never do that to me."

A grin made its way across his face as he leaned into her hand again. "No, I wouldn't."

"I'm never gonna stop worrying about the you in another universe, and I'm never gonna stop loving him. He's the Doctor, and I'm always gonna love him. But it doesn't make much sense to miss you when you're right in front of me, yeah?" he gave her a weak smile not quite sure how he felt about this whole openness thing anymore.

She grinned back at him as she moved the hand she had on his cheek up so she could run it through his hair. His eyes slipped closed as he let himself enjoy the sensation of her fingers on his scalp, the feeling luring him dangerously close to sleeping. He jerked himself awake at the muffled sound of a yawn from Rose.

"Oh, I don't want to fall asleep," she mumbled out, her fingers never stopping their torturously soothing rhythm in his hair.

"Why not?"

"'Cause I only just got you back, an' I don't think falling asleep right now is the best reunion we could have."

"I don't know, Rose Tyler asleep in my arms… Can't think of anything better than that."

~TBC

AN2: I almost skipped this chapter entirely and just got on with the action but there are several parts I quite liked and I would have missed them so you're all stuck reading it.


	7. Chapter 7

Title: Into the Woods (7/20)  
Pairing: TenII/Rose  
Rating: PG  
Genre: Action/adventure, romance, drama (just a smidge)  
Spoilers: Just to be safe let's say everything up to JE.  
Disclaimer: I don't own them and I make no money off of them (if anything it's the other way around)  
Summary: After being left on the beach the Doctor, Rose and Jackie are forced to stay overnight in a small Norway village until they can get home, but something strange is happening in the quiet town.  
Authors Note: Finally the story!

Thank you to my amazing beta mik109 and your talent for building bridges.

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Jackie flopped over in her bed for what had to be at least the thousandth time since she dropped onto it.

She had finished talking to Rose, made sure she made it into her room fine then promptly turned around and went into her own. She fell into her bed not more than a few seconds later, blissfully happy to not have to worry about one more thing that night. Seemed the joke was on her though.

Ever since she had landed in bed, there had been one little hard spot somewhere under the mattress or maybe in the mattress, which was preventing her final fall into exhausted sleep. It could be a broken spring or something. Not that it mattered what it was. She definitely couldn't care less what it was that was digging into her no matter where she turned on the bed. All she cared about was the fact that she couldn't get to sleep because of it.

Back and forth she flopped, on top of the covers, under the covers. She tried moving to either side of the bed, to the point where she almost fell off the edge in her search for a spot that wouldn't dig in. She tried to use the extra pillows and blankets to cover the spot. At one point, she found herself lying on top of no less than two pillows stacked on top of one another with a folded up sheet thrown on top of them. She had even gone so far as to try turning to sleep across the bed instead of up and down it. Nothing was working. Somehow the offending spot moved right along with her, making very sure she was as completely uncomfortable as possible.

"Honestly!" she grumbled out to the darkness of her room. How did they ever expect to get any customers with beds like this one? They couldn't possibly all be this bad, could they? The one she had stayed in last time hadn't been. She definitely would have remembered that.

She flipped over one last time, her eyes boring into the door of her room, that infamous Jackie Tyler rage starting to find its way past the exhaustion which had kept it down as long as it possibly could. By the time she felt the all too familiar dig of whatever it was that was bothering her once again, it had been the last straw.

With a groan, she threw the covers off with a flourish. She slid off the two pillows she had stacked under her body and marched over to where she had slid her shoes off, hastily shoving her feet back into them. She yanked the door of her room open, surprised when the door didn't slam against the wall of her room with the force she had used on it, and began marching downstairs to give whoever was unlucky enough to be down there a piece of her mind.

"Hello?!" she bellowed out as she finished walking down the last few steps. She breezed past the large fire and sitting area of the lobby, keen to find whoever was working the desk. After several moments of intense glaring and angry muttering, she decided no one was there, or they were hiding from her because they knew why she was there. Really, how could any self-respecting motel rent out a room with a bed that bad in it?

"Course, no one 'round when you need them," she muttered to herself as she turned back towards the stairs, maybe Rose's door would be unlocked and she could just go in there and sleep on her bed with her.

As Jackie began to make her way back up the stairs, she noticed a shadow move out of the corner of her eye. It wasn't the same kind of shadows flickering around thanks to the fire, since she had come downstairs. Oh, no, this was the distinct shadow of someone trying to hide on one of the overly large chairs near the fire. This was the shadow of someone who didn't want to get an earful. This was the shadow of one very unlucky soul, because her yelling was already going to be bad, but now that she knew whoever was supposed to be working was hiding from her, it was going to be much, much worse.

Jackie turned back around and began to march towards the figure on the chair. She made sure to walk as quietly as her trainers would let her. It was going to be the perfect sneak attack. She'd make her way around the chair and then BAM! They'd get a yelling like they'd never had before if she had her way.

Jackie began to make her way around the chair, completely ready to lay into the person who currently was occupying it, when she noticed the figure lurch in the chair almost like they weren't quite seated in it correctly. 'Serves 'em right to be uncomfortable' she thought as she neared the edge of the chair. The light from the fire danced across the outline of the figure as it hunched in the chair, the horribly ugly floral print of the dressing gown it wore seemed to almost glow in the light.

It wasn't until she stood next to the chair that she noticed how very wrong the shape of the figure crouched in the chair was. It was large and the dressing gown was pulled far too tight across parts where it should have hung loosely and where there should have been hands and feet were massive paws. The figure's entire body was covered in a course brown fur, and worst of all, it was currently leveling an evil stare right at Jackie, its yellow eyes practically piercing through her.

"Oh, my god!" she managed to cry out, though it came out more of a quick whisper than anything else, as she turned and ran as quickly as she could back up the stairs.

The sound of claws on wood scrambling to try and follow her echoed in her ears. She was so focused on her escape she didn't slow down even when the sound of tearing material and the heavy thud of a large body hitting a wall the floor below her registered in her brain. Whatever it was that had been trying to chase her wasn't going to be able to any longer because it had tripped unceremoniously on the clothing it had been trying to wear and had skid into a wall, effectively knocking it out for the moment. She wasn't going to chance it though so she just kept right on running up the stairs.

Jackie turned the corner as she reached her floor and ran to the only person she could think of to deal with a problem like this. "Doctor!" she shouted grabbing hold of his doorknob and roughly shoving the door open.

She slammed the door shut behind her and spun around to survey the dark room. "Doctor?" she asked the darkness as she turned on the lamp on the bedside table. Her mouth hung open loosely at the sight of a very empty room greeted her. "Fat lot of good you are!" she proclaimed loudly turning to reenter the hallway as quietly as possible.

Jackie opened the door just enough for her to see out into the hallway. She stood there for a moment, barely breathing, as she watched for any signs of the thing that had been chasing her minutes earlier. She took a deep breath and pushed her way out of the room and quickly turned to the door next to it.

"Rose, sweetheart," Jackie said as she opened the door to her room as quietly as possible, "I don't want you to panic or anything but I just went next door to the Doctor's room and he's not ther – What the hell do you think you're doing?!" she shouted loudly, interrupting herself, her mouth hanging open just enough to make her look shocked and indignant but not quite enough to look ridiculous.

"Well, I was sleeping, Jackie," the Doctor answered blearily, obviously still a little dazed from being woken up so rudely. He stared at Jackie for a moment, noting how she looked like she was about to haul off and slap him again, which woke the Doctor up rather quickly actually.

"It's been years and you think you can just waltz back into her life and-" she began to yell at him.

"We were only sleeping, Mum," Rose tried to explain, annoyed by the fact that her mother was reacting so badly to two completely clothed, by multiple layers at that, adults laying in the same bed together. They hadn't even been cuddling, much to her chagrin.

"I don't care. What happened to taking things slow an' getting to know each other again?" she asked in that way she had where it sounded far more like a demand than a question.

An annoyed course of Mum and Jackie met her question, the two of them speaking at the exact same time.

"No," she said to the both of them before sending a glare at the Doctor. "An' you butt out of it! This is between me an' my daughter."

"It really isn't, Jackie," he spat out as calmly as he could, fighting back the urge to call her blondie which he was sure was the Donna in him and it wouldn't do to have Donna outbursts whenever he was tired and frustrated. Even bleary eyed from sleep he realized he was braving the very real danger of getting himself slapped by Jackie once again. A slap from Jackie was something he had promised himself to never willingly put himself in the position to receive again. Apparently, his memory wasn't as good as it had been, or maybe the sleep had affected him somehow.

"'Course it is," she shot back at him.

"Hold on. You went next door?" Rose asked, breaking into whatever verbal sparring match had been about to take place between the Doctor and her Mother.

"What?" both the Doctor and Jackie asked, turning to stare at her.

"Just now, when you came in, you said you went next door," she explained to both of them, fixing her mother with a look she hoped spelt out the rest of what she was thinking. After a moment of awkward silence which unfortunately proved her look hadn't spelt out the rest of what she was thinking, she asked the question aloud. "Why?"

"OH! There was this thing! This horrible thing."

"Caught your reflection in a mirror, did you?" the Doctor muttered darkly to himself which earned him a little, half-hearted, exasperated glare from Rose.

"It was downstairs just sitting there, in the lobby. It was huge and hairy and it was wearing a dressing gown too," she explained to the pair.

Rose was sitting upright in the bed, one leg curled up under her body as she stared at her mother. The Doctor was leaning back on his elbows as he also stared at Jackie. Neither of them moved an inch as they continued to silently appraise Jackie.

"Oy, stop lookin' at me like that an' do something!" she proclaimed loudly before crossing her arms across her chest. Really, the pair of them could travel across all of time and space but when she gets chased around by a bloody enormous hairy beastie the two of them act like she's lost her mind.

"Where did you see this 'horrible thing'?" the Doctor asked as he moved to stand up. Well, sleeping had been nice while it lasted, all 48.235 minutes of it.

"Downstairs," Jackie said as the two started to make their way to the door. "It started to chase me, but it never came all the way upstairs. I think it must have tripped and knocked itself out," she explained as she slowly followed the two out of the room.

The trio finally and rather slowly considering they were only one floor up made their way into the lobby of the motel. They all looked around the room in search of whatever had chased Jackie.

"Well," the Doctor said as he scanned the chair in which Jackie had told them she found the 'thing', whatever it was, sitting in when she came downstairs.

"Whatever it was, looks like it's gone now," Rose told her mother softly.

"If it ever was here," the Doctor muttered to himself again, which earned him a little smack from Rose. He turned and gave her his very best 'What? Like you weren't thinking it.' looks as he made a mental note to mutter more quietly around Rose since she seemed to have better hearing than he had remembered. That mental note lead him to the thought that maybe her hearing had always been that good and he just never noticed because he usually muttered about people she wasn't related to so she didn't feel the need to react to it.

"I'm not crazy. It was here. Of all the people in the world, you're the ones that should believe me," Jackie said angrily, as she glared at the pair of them.

"Well, what did it look like, Jackie?" the Doctor asked as he turned to keep looking for any hint at something out of the ordinary.

"I told you."

"Yes, well a 'horrible thing' isn't really enough to go on now is it?" he began to complain just as something caught his eye.

Right there by the edge of the stairs was a piece of material. It was frayed along the edges as though it had been ripped off something and it matched the vague description, if you could call it that as all she had said was 'it was wearing a dressing gown too' which did not make it very descriptive at all, that Jackie had given them.

The Doctor walked over to the offending piece of material and picked it up off the ground. He shoved his hand into one of his ridiculously deep pockets for the pair of specs he had stashed there the last time he had worn this particular suit. He turned the piece of material over and over in his hands as he studied it.

"That's it!" exclaimed Jackie when she saw the material the Doctor had clutched in his hand. "That's what the thing was wearin'," she finished explaining as she and Rose walked over to stand next to him by the stairs.

The Doctor nodded absentmindedly before reaching into his suit jacket again to pull out the sonic screwdriver.

"You've still got it," Rose stated as he began to use it on the material.

"Yup!" he said happily as he adjusted the screwdriver to run a scan on the fabric. "Never leave the TARDIS without it, or your original universe for a parallel world at any rate."

She watched him fiddle with the settings on the screwdriver, a small smile on her face. "I was a little worried. Don't know what you would have done without it… Don't think I've ever seen you without it come to think of it."

"Oh, well, interesting story…good story…" he began to tell her, grinning at her while his sonic worked away at analyzing the material. "I was on a planet, first time out in my new blue suit, when I found myself, very suddenly and for no reason what-so-ever, captured by the Insureu," he told her as he stared at the readings the sonic screwdriver was giving him. They didn't make any sense so he again adjusted the settings and ran another test. "They're these tiny little lizard men, come up to about my waist."

"What did you do?" she asked honestly curious about what had happened to him in the time they had been apart, and this seemed like a safe enough story to start with.

"Well, they threw me into a jail cell, which wouldn't have been that big of a problem, except they're only about a meter tall, the cells that is, and I am rather larger than a meter tall…"

"I meant to get arrested," she told him.

"Oy! I told you it was for no reason what-so-ever!" Rose gave him a look, letting him know she didn't believe that for a second. "Well…maybe I accidentally parked the TARDIS in one of their temples," he amended, "but it was in the back. The…far back. Practically not even inside, which really isn't as disrespectful of their Gods as they made it out to be," he quickly explained making sure she knew.

She nodded, her tongue sticking out between her teeth. "Right."

"You're supposed to be on my side, filled with righteous indignation for me," he said as he gave her a stern look full of the indignation she was supposed to be feeling for him.

"Oh, I am," she said trying to hold back an almost manic grin.

"You have a funny way of showing it. But never mind that, the point I was trying to make with my tale of woe was that I was stuck in a meter tall cage for a night because I forgot to put my sonic screwdriver into my new blue suit," he explained to her. "Dimensionally transcendent pockets, all the room you could ever ask for, and I didn't have my trusty sonic screwdriver."

"So how'd you get out?"

"I used a combination of my very quick wit and devastating charm."

Rose nodded and couldn't help the smile that broke across her face. "You ran, didn't you?" she asked already knowing the answer.

"Yeah," she laughed at the quickness of his answer. "Put one in every suit since then. Took me a little while to build that many," he told her as he stared at the new readings. "Well, Jackie, it looks like you're horrible thing was a wolf."

"A wolf?" Rose asked giving him a look.

"That's what it says," he told her, wiggling the sonic screwdriver in front of her with one hand as he put his glasses back into his pocket with the other. "_Canis lupus_, just your average, run of the mill, gray wolf."

Jackie stared at him for a moment before she looked down to the piece of material he was still holding in his hand. "How could it just be an average wolf if it was wearin' a dressing gown?"

"No idea," he said with a shake of his head. "That's what makes it fun." He added giving Rose a wide grin, one she happily returned.

Jackie rolled her eyes. "How you two can be so cheery with no sleep is anyone's guess," she mumbled as she moved past the two. "Don't know what time it is-" the Doctor opened his mouth to interrupt her only to be interrupted right back. "An' I don't care! All I want to do is go to sleep an…Oh, my God," she finished as she stared out the front window of the motel.

"What? What is it?" Rose asked as she took two quick steps towards her mother.

"Its day time," Jackie said pointing out the window, the other two turning to stare out with her. The softly waning harvest moon that had barely lit up the cold night had been replaced by a blazing midday sun hanging high in the sky bathing the entire town in light.

"It can't be day time. It's not even midnight yet. There's no way it can be daytime now." the Doctor said to no one in particular as he rushed to make his way outside.

Once outside, the Doctor looked around for some explanation for why the sun was up at this time of night. Rose and Jackie came up beside him, Jackie cupping her hands around her eyes to try and block them from the blazing sun. "What's going on?" he asked himself, honestly baffled.

"That wasn't there when we came in," Rose said pointing at a huge green…well thing was the only word she could come up with to accurately describe it. It was easily four meters around, and it was round, and it reached all the way up to the cloud spotted sky.

"What?" the Doctor asked spinning around, his eyes landing on the same thing Rose's had. "Oh, well…" he said before pulling out his sonic screwdriver again. He really hadn't planned on using it any time soon, or as often as he already had since arriving in Pete's World.

"No…it can't be," the Doctor said once more baffled by the readings he was getting from the sonic screwdriver for the third time that night, or possibly that afternoon if the sun was to be believed. He scanned the large green spire once again. "No…" he shoved the sonic screwdriver back into his pocket and leaned forward to lick the semi-smooth surface. "It is…"

Jackie gaped at the man as he leaned away from the surface of the towering mass.

"It's a beanstalk," the Doctor said, still completely bewildered by this unexpected information. He followed the line of the beanstalk with his eyes, all the way up, as far as he could before it vanished in the wisps of clouds floating above the town. His confusion suddenly turned to excitement as he quickly turned to the woman next to him. "Rose!"

"You're not climbin' it!"

"But-" he began to argue before he was rudely cut off by a strange, high pitched, voice.

"Run, run, run as fast as you can," the voice cried out mockingly from seemingly nowhere, "you can't catch me!"

The three all looked at one another before leaning to the side so they could look around the trunk of the beanstalk in front of them, their eyes all fixing on the small figure that ran past.

The Doctor straightened and sniffed, because really he had no idea what else to do in a situation like this. "Did anyone else see a sentient baked good just run by?" he asked nonchalantly as though seeing a running, talking sweet was the sort of thing that happened to him every day.

After a chorus of yeses from the Tyler women, the Doctor nodded to himself, eyes again moving up the beanstalk. "That's what I thought."

~TBC


	8. Chapter 8

Title: Into the Woods (8/20)  
Pairing: TenII/Rose  
Rating: PG  
Genre: Action/adventure, romance, drama (just a smidge)  
Spoilers: Just to be safe let's say everything up to JE.  
Disclaimer: I don't own them and I make no money off of them (if anything it's the other way around)  
Summary: After being left on the beach the Doctor, Rose and Jackie are forced to stay overnight in a small Norway village until they can get home, but something strange is happening in the quiet town.  
Authors Note: I wasn't going to post this until Monday out of fear of spamming everyone but homework has done my head in just slightly and I needed a break from it so you get this now because of it.

Thank you to my amazing beta **mik109** who does nothing but feed my love of Jackie by tell me to "make Jackie say it" whenever I had a snarky comment about what was happening in the story.

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"What the hell is going on?" Jackie barked as she glared at the man in front of her, crossing her arms over her chest to emphasize her displeasure.

"What?" he asked both befuddled and surprised by how quickly he had earned Jackie's ire.

"This is your fault," she said angrily.

"How can it possibly be my fault? I only just got here," he practically yelped in irritation turning so he could glare at Jackie. "I've only just been born if you want to get technical."

"You're always off lookin' for trouble," chided Jackie.

"I never ever go looking for trouble, Jackie," he responded heatedly, earning himself a smirk from Rose. He couldn't tell if that smirk was because she didn't believe him for a second or because he'd said 'never ever' after he had told her to never say that. Though, if he was being honest, he knew it was the former and not the latter.

"Right, course you don't," Jackie drawled condescendingly, shifting her hands to her hips in a stance that clearly expressed her disbelief. "You don't need to go lookin' for it 'cause it always finds you. You're like a magnet for trouble!"

"I am not a magnet for trouble," he shot back.

"Oh? Then explain how it's day all of a sudden?" she asked

"Well-"

"And what about the gingerbread man that just ran past us?" she continued cutting him off.

"That-"

"Or the beanstalk?" she cut him off again.

"It's-"

"Or the wolf in a dressing gown that chased me earlier?" she cut him off yet again.

"Umm-"

"Or the dragon?" Rose added preventing both her mother's next example and what would be another attempted explanation by the Doctor.

"What?" they asked simultaneously turning to stare at her.

Rose shrugged slightly. "There's a dragon over there," she simply pointed behind them to the far side of town.

"You're jokin'!" Jackie exclaimed as both of their heads whipped around to look in the direction Rose was pointing.

The Doctor nodded slowly as he stared over the rooftops to the far edge of town. There, nestled along the edge of the dense foliage of the woods, sat a dragon. The creature perched on its haunches, its black scales glittering in the newly midday sun. Its huge wings spread out behind it as though it was about to take flight. Its head reared back as it roared loudly, the sound reverberating through the town as smoke and flames erupted from its gaping jaws. As the roar ended, the creature turned away from the town, seemingly happy to have made its presence well enough known, to find a spot somewhere where it could remain undisturbed.

"Yup, that's a dragon," he stared at the creature as it made its slow retreat. He turned back towards Rose who was grinning at him in that same mischievous way she used to when she was trying to get him to agree to something he knew was a bad idea. "What?"

"You know things like this only ever happen when you're around," she said still grinning at him.

"What? You mean fairytales don't just come alive in this universe?"

She shook her head no as her grin grew even wider, a grin he was returning with equal aplomb. It really was just like old times and if he didn't have the constant reminder of only the one heart beating away inside of his chest, and the lack of the TARDIS humming in the back of his mind, he might have even been able to imagine they were back just as they had been before she had ever been lost to him. Back when they were running from Werewolves and bat creatures and alien entities in television sets.

"That's what this is then, fairytales coming to life?"

And his stroll down memory lane vanished just as quickly as it had begun. He really couldn't wait to be rid of Jackie again. He turned to level a hard, steady look at Jackie. "Yes."

"How?"

"Oh, I don't know. That's part of the fun!" he said, giving Rose a wink, as he turned to regard the rest of the town.

Jackie stared at the Doctor for a short moment before shaking her head and shoving her hand into the pocket of her jacket. "I'm callin' your father," she announced as she quickly punched in the number.

"So, where do we start?" Rose asked eagerly as she joined the Doctor in looking around the town.

"Oh I dunno, we can look around…possibly battle a dragon?"

She bit her bottom lip as she looked towards where the dragon had disappeared. "Yeah, rather not do that. How 'bout you?"

He shook his head solemnly as he also turned to look back at the building. "Not if I can avoid it," he answered her honestly. "Dragons are highly intelligent peaceful creatures…at least they are when they aren't hungry..."

"Rose, can I see your phone for a mo?" Jackie asked from behind the two before she had a chance to ask him how he could possibly know that.

"Yeah, sure," Rose answered as she dug into the pocket of her coat for her mobile. "Why 'dya need it?" she asked as she handed the phone to her mother.

"Mine won't connect, figure it's just a bad signal," Jackie answered as she took the phone and began punching in the number. "Figure'd yours would have one though," she finished as she hit dial.

Jackie shook her head and pulled the phone away from her ear. "Same thing," she said staring down at the phone in her hand. "Won't connect."

The Doctor took the phone from Jackie, he put on his glasses and flipped the mobile over. "Little jiggery pokery…" he said as he pulled out parts and put them back in and ran the sonic over the whole thing once for good measure. "Well that's odd, it's not working…"

"I just told ya that," Jackie added unhelpfully.

The Doctor looked up again as he handed the phone back to Rose. "Fairytales…fairytales brought to life…but how, why? Why are you showing up and why are you in Norway?"

"Oy, why are we in Norway?" Jackie asked angrily earning her a glare from her daughter.

The Doctor ignored Jackie as best he could considering the fact that she was standing just behind him. Maybe if he ignored her long enough she would actually disappear, he thought sourly.

"It doesn't make sense. Why fairytales? What do fairytales have to do with this town?"

"Do you think this has something to do with those dead birds we saw, and our phones not working?" Rose asked.

He turned towards her and considered it for a moment. "It'd be a strange coincidence if it wasn't," he said which earned him a little half smile from her, a half smile which he also chose to ignore for completely different reasons than why he was ignoring Jackie. Reasons like not being able to think straight when faced with that grin he had missed for so long.

He turned away from her looking around the town. "Fairytales, phones not working, dead birds, what do they all have in common?" he asked himself pushing his tongue up to the back of his teeth as he often did when trying to work out a problem like this. "No…no, something doesn't make sense. It doesn't add up. Birds are dying but no other animals. Your mobile doesn't work in this town even though it worked on the beach and those fairytales coming to life have to take a lot of power," he explained to the two women. "How are they related? Oh think, think, think," he grumbled to himself as he ran his hands through his hair both of them coming to rest on the top of his head as the continued.

Jackie narrowed her eyes at the Doctor's back as she muttered to herself something that sounded an awful lot like 'nothing you say makes sense' before she turned to look at her daughter who was, in turn, staring at the Doctor as well. "He always like this?" she asked jerking her head towards her daughter's would-be-beau.

"He was when we traveled together."

"Bit manic don't you think?" she asked as she continued to watch the man in front of her.

"It doesn't make sense. How are they related?" the Doctor continued genuinely unaware of the conversation taking place just behind him. "Or maybe they aren't related, maybe they're separate? Are they? Can they be? No…yes…gah. It doesn't make sense!" he shouted giving his hair a decent pull before rubbing his hands across his face. "I need to solve this one problem at a time," he muttered to himself noting how much easier this all was when he wasn't tired, both physically and emotionally.

He quickly spun back around to the two women behind him. "Right! What's the big problem here?" he asked them

"The phones not workin'," Jackie answered quickly cutting off any response Rose had been about to give.

The grin the Doctor had been giving Rose fell instantly as he gave Jackie a wide-eyed stare. "What? No, no, not the phones. How the fairytales…wait, why the phones?" he began to chide her before he lost track of that thought and cut himself off to ask another question.

"We don't know if this is happening everywhere or just here and we can't ask anyone for any help without the phones. We're completely cut off without them," she explained.

"'Cept…My phone can call from anywhere." Rose said as the Doctor gave Jackie an appraising look.

"And anytime, full time traveling upgrade," the Doctor said grinning at his own handiwork.

"But even it doesn't work, yeah?" she asked getting a nod from her mother and the Doctor. "Then there probably aren't any other phones here that'll work. Right?"

"Well…it could be something that's interfering with the mobiles directly," the Doctor said reluctantly. "Not likely though…but, it's an old town, they're bound to have landlines. A direct connection might still work," the Doctor said obviously not too hopeful with their prospects.

"Well, it's better than just sittin' 'round here and doing nothing," Jackie said as she turned to make her way back towards the middle of town. "Bet they've got a phone this way, you know…far away from that thing," she said waving her hand towards where the dragon had disappeared off to.

Rose and the Doctor shared a look before following after Jackie. The Doctor made sure to check around the buildings around them as they slowly made their way back towards the front of the motel. "It's quiet," he said as he and Rose rounded the corner of the building.

"'S no use. The phones don't work in there either," Jackie told them as she left the motel.

"Yeah, that was a long shot."

"So what now?" Rose asked looking up at the Doctor.

"Not sure…But, I think I'd like to know where everyone in town has gone off to," he said looking around the very abandoned roads. "Fairytales are coming alive and there's no panicking, no screaming, no running for your lives. Don't you think that's odd?"

"No," Rose shook her head slowly as she too inspected the buildings of the town as Jackie started to make her way over towards them. "The Darkness had everyone worried for so long 's like everyone just got used to the idea of the world ending. People were calling it the end of days and going on about how it'd be impossible to save us."

"Oh, but you love proving the impossible isn't so far off, don't you?"

She gave him a lighthearted quirk of her lips that didn't last longer than a moment before she grew serious again. "The thing is, we've dealt with alien invasions and evil plots of world domination and all but watching the stars blink out of existence one by one...that was worse. We watched them disappear for months before all that was left was us and no one thought we'd make it out of that...so yeah, people are bound to still be scared."

"Do you think that's why it's so quiet then? 'Cause everyone's just hiding? Not anything else?" Jackie asked as she finally reached the pair.

"Only one way to know for sure," the Doctor said as he turned back towards the town. "We start poking about. See if we can't find anyone who's noticed something that could cause fairytales to come alive."

"You could always just run a scan for alien tech," Rose said to him teasingly as she fiddled with the cuff of her blue leather jacket.

"Oh, but where's the fun in that?" he asked in all seriousness.

Rose fought back a grin at the face he made as she shook her head and Jackie fought to keep from rolling her eyes at the pair of them.

The walk from the beach had been tense and awkward for the most part and extremely uncomfortable for everyone, well at least until her daughter and her alien boyfriend had silently agreed to just ignore all of their issues until they could think them over longer. During that walk, Jackie had told herself if she never had to deal with that kind of tense silence from the two again it would be too soon. Oh, she had definitely spoken, to herself at least, too soon.

Jackie walked a few steps behind the Doctor and Rose. The pair walked close to each other, though not hand in hand as she had often seen them before, which definitely made her think they had made at least a little progress since being dumped in this universe. Not that she was complaining mind you. Jackie couldn't have been happier with the outcome of their latest, and hopefully her last, adventure into saving the Universe. She got to keep her family and Rose got to keep her Doctor, even if he was a bit more human now.

It wasn't until she had seen Rose's face, and the Doctor's for that matter, after that blue box disappeared forever that she even began to think how maybe this wasn't the happily ever after she had thought it was. That, coupled with the silence on the walk, had her worried about the two of them.

She was worried they would have to really work at the camaraderie they had shared so easily before and they wouldn't be able to get over being abandoned in a world where they'd be stuck in one place, and one time, forever. But, as she watched them talk quietly in front of her, she realized that as long as she had him, and he had her, they'd be fine. Besides here they were in the middle of another adventure like nothing had ever changed, they didn't even need that blue box.

"Maybe we should split up? We could cover more ground that way," Rose asked trying to be helpful and cutting off Jackie's current course of thought.

"Get into more trouble 's what you mean," Jackie said with a scoff. "Besides who's to say he won't find a gingerbread house and go inside?"

"She's got a point," the Doctor said. "Not about me and the gingerbread house," he began to explain when he noticed Rose eyeing him oddly. "It's just safer if we all stick together."

"But they're fairytales," Rose said with a skeptical grin. "Bedtime stories, Disney movies, happily ever after, the end."

"Not originally," the Doctor said. "Most fairytales are based off the Grimm stories. The Grimm brothers gathered all of the local German folk tales of their time to make those and they were anything but sweet. They were filled with sex and death and violence. Oh sure they've been watered down over the years, but they didn't start that way. And they've been told so many times, who knows what version of the story this is," he finished explaining, silently hoping she would just agree to stay together and not go wandering off.

"Well nothing bad 's happened yet." Rose said in an almost sing-song voice, one that reminded him of how very often she would wander off and get into massive amounts of trouble.

"Oy!" Jackie shouted getting the two of them to stop walking and look back at her. "I got chased by a murderous wolf in case you've forgotten."

"Yes, exactly! Your Mum was almost eaten alive by a ravenous wolf," the Doctor said emphatically pointing back at Jackie in triumph. "Probably thought she was the grandma from Little Red Riding Hood," he added quietly as he looked Jackie up and down suspiciously.

"I'm standing right here!" Jackie barked as she glared at the Doctor for all she was worth, and in this Universe that was quite a lot actually.

"Yes, Jackie," the Doctor said as he gave Jackie an equally unhappy look. "Believe me, I noticed."

Rose rolled her eyes at the two of them as they bickered back and forth. If she hadn't already come to the conclusion that the man standing next to her in a blue pinstriped suit was actually the Doctor, his interactions with her mother would have more than proved it.

"You being here is the only reason I know this isn't all just a very strange dream," he added quickly before turning away from her.

Yup, he was definitely the same man.

Rose grinned to herself and muttered something about how some things never change as she turned away from the bickering pair. As she turned, Rose caught sight of something moving out of the corner of her eye. Across the road they were currently standing in the middle of was a woman, the first person she had seen since coming out of the motel.

The woman looked to be about the same height as Rose. Her dark hair was pulled back into a loose bun and she was wearing a loose fitting green dress. She glanced over her shoulder. Her eyes instantly fixed on Rose, before she quickly turned away and began to hurry off down a small side street.

"Wait!" Rose shouted as she took off after the woman, getting both Jackie's and the Doctor's attention along the way.

"Wait, Rose!" Jackie shouted as she turned to follow after her daughter.

"She never listens," the Doctor grumbled as he too chased after Rose.

~TBC (most likely on Monday, possibly Tuesday depending on the homework status)


	9. Chapter 9

Title: Into the Woods (9/20)  
Pairing: TenII/Rose  
Rating: PG  
Genre: Action/adventure, romance, drama (just a smidge)  
Spoilers: Just to be safe let's say everything up to JE.  
Disclaimer: I don't own them and I make no money off of them (if anything it's the other way around)  
Summary: After being left on the beach the Doctor, Rose and Jackie are forced to stay overnight in a small Norway village until they can get home, but something strange is happening in the quiet town.  
Authors Note: The updates are probably going to be a bit spread out now that schools gotten into full swing. Expect it at least once a week, possibly more.

Thank you to my amazing beta mik109 who helps with homework band/b fanfic! You're a doll.

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Rose rounded the corner and found the woman pushing her way past an old wooden gate at the mouth of a fence that surrounded a small home. "Wait," she called after her again, this time less forcefully as she raised her hands in front of her in the intergalactic sign of 'don't be afraid I'm not going to hurt you'.

The woman spun around and stared at Rose, the wooden gate slowly swinging shut between the two of them. She stood ramrod straight, as though she was afraid to move, as she continued to stare at Rose in a mixture of confusion and mild fear.

The Doctor came around the corner, Jackie a good deal further behind him, and came to an abrupt stop as the woman turned to stare at him nervously. "Oh."

"It's okay," Rose said quietly which earned her the woman's attention again. "We're here to help," she explained as the Doctor slowly made his way over to stand next to her and Jackie finally made it around the corner.

"You shouldn't run off like that," the Doctor said with a forced smile, clearly angry at her for having gone off without thinking about how dangerous it could have been, as he continued to stare at the woman in front of him.

"I couldn't just let her disappear, could I?" Rose asked in a clipped tone as she too continued to watch the nervous looking woman in front of them. She was a bit annoyed at being told not to run after possible danger by the man who had very probably invented the activity.

"Hi, 'm Rose."

"They don't speak English, Rose. She won't understand a word you're sayin'," Jackie said as she came up behind her and the Doctor.

"I understand her fine," the woman barked back at her angrily.

"She does? You do?" the Doctor asked as he did a small double take of the woman.

"Yes," the woman answered impatiently as her eyes darted around them as though she was looking for something.

"Wait, can you two can understand what she's saying?" the Doctor asked as he eyed the Tyler women.

"Well, yeah, 'S English, isn't it?" Rose responded giving the Doctor one of Tony's patented 'you're just being silly now' looks, something she was sure he'd be getting a lot more of if they ever made it back home.

"No," he said shaking his head. "No, that's Norwegian. She's speaking Norwegian."

"Of course I'm speaking Norwegian. We're in Norway," the woman barked again though the Doctor ignored the comment completely as he continued to stare at Rose.

"Rose," he began seriously, his hands coming up to hold onto her shoulders, "do you understand what I'm saying?" he finished asking and when she nodded yes he leaned back so he could regard her in the same way he would look at the TARDIS when it began to act up.

"Really?" He said obviously baffled. "Even now? How about now?" he continued to question, getting a nod in the affirmative with each sentence. "I am speaking in Jodoon. Now, I am speaking in Latin. Now, I am speaking in -"

"Yeah, I understand you just fine," she said quickly cutting him off from going through any more of the hundreds of languages he knew.

"We're being translated…well isn't that wizard?" the Doctor frowned at the Donnaism and plowed forward with his train of thought before Rose could ask him about it. "We'll come back to that later," he said and turned back towards the woman. "Hello, I'm the Doctor."

"And I'm Jackie," she said waving her hand feebly up in the air, feeling a bit like the odd one out with the other two mostly blocking her from the woman's view.

The woman eyed the Doctor suspiciously before glancing between Rose and Jackie and then back again. "Freya," the woman said tentatively obviously still a bit wary of the strangers.

"We're here to help, Freya, but we need to ask you a few questions first, yeah?" Rose asked softly as she gave the woman an encouraging smile.

The woman shifted nervously, her eyes darting between the Rose and Doctor. Neither of them looked like all of the other things that had been going on around her, definitely not something out of a bedtime story she decided. She sighed quietly to herself before giving them a curt nod.

"Do you know where everyone is?" Rose asked her quietly.

"The caves. They would go to the caves," the woman answered her, her voice also quiet though if it was out of nerves or because she was worried about something overhearing her was anyone's guess. "The last time, when the…" Freya's eyes fell to the ground as she trailed off, clearly shaken by the thought of what had happened before. "We went to the caves," she finished quickly choosing to avoid any further thought about that particular event.

"What caves?" the Doctor asked in an equally soft voice as the one Rose had been using.

Freya's eyes flew up to look at him. "There's a system of them that run under the town. They're big enough for everyone and they only have a few openings at the edge of the town. It's where everyone would go."

"If everyone's gone to the caves, what are you still doing here?" Jackie butted in which got her a glare from the Doctor. "What? Only you an' Rose get to ask questions?"

"I can't leave my daughter," the woman explained. "She was hurt out in the woods yesterday. I just needed to make sure my son went with our neighbors to the caves, but I don't want to move her."

"What happened?" Rose asked suddenly cutting off any further questions about the caves or anything else going on.

The woman shook her head sadly, her eyes darting to the floor. "She had an accident," she explained simply not too keen on expanding upon the statement.

The Doctor nodded. "Listen, this might be a bit of an odd question but have you noticed anything odd lately?" he asked in complete seriousness. "Not about the Darkness, just anything specifically odd that was happening here before the sun came up," he quickly amended.

The woman thought about it for a moment before shaking her head. "The stars came back yesterday and today this is happening but I don't know of anything else."

"Really? Nothing at all?" the woman shook her head no again. "Nothing…fell out of the sky or was built recently…" he pushed.

"What about the phones?" Jackie asked.

"Really, what is it with you and the phones?" the Doctor muttered to himself, but not quietly enough to have been missed by Rose, or Jackie for that matter.

"We've never had much use for phones," Freya answered trying to look over the Doctor's shoulder to where Jackie was standing, glaring at him. "The landlines usually work alright but we can never get any signal for a cell phone. People usually just come here to get away."

"Do you know someone else who might have noticed anything?" the Doctor asked as he tried to keep them on topic.

The woman shook her head slowly.

"Oh well, worth a try," the Doctor said as he pushed his hands into his pockets for lack of anything better to do.

Jackie pushed forward squeezing between the Doctor and Rose. "Which way to these caves then?" she asked a bit briskly. She was done with being the third wheel to the tag team/dream duo/pan-dimensional pair that was the Doctor and Rose.

Freya stared at the slightly shorter woman for a moment before pointing down the road to her right. "That way," She said simply. "Follow the road until you reach the edge of the town. You'll see a dirt cart path that leads into the woods. It's very old and hardly ever used so it will disappear after a short while, but if you keep going straight, it will pick up again. Follow that path and it will take you to the caves."

Jackie nodded resolutely. She gave the woman in front of her a warm smile that said everything she needed too before setting off down the road she had been pointed down.

Rose and the Doctor watched Jackie for a moment before exchanging looks and turning back towards Freya. "Thank you, Freya, for your help. You should go back inside. Take care of your daughter," Rose told her with a sad smile.

The Doctor nodded. "We'll take care of…all of this," he said pointing around them vaguely. "And I doubt anything will bother you if you stay quiet and out of the way…just don't make any promises to a dwarf or anything," he said seriously. "Though if you do, his name is Rumpelstiltskin…or Rumpelstilzchen, that's the German version," he added thoughtfully. "And thank you," he said with a grin.

Freya nodded, though her face told them that she had no idea what he was on about, and turned to make her way back into her home. She stopped briefly, her hand hovering over the handle of her door, as she glanced back towards the two. "Good luck," she shouted getting a pair of wide smiles from the two of them.

"Alright then, let's go." The Doctor said with a grin jerking his head in the direction Jackie had taken. He took three steps before stopping dead in his tracks. "Wait," he turned and gave Rose a grave look, "you just heard me say let's go, didn't you?"

"Yeah," she answered giving him a bemused grin.

He groaned in frustration and began walking yet again, his hands stuffed into his pockets dejectedly all the while grumbling about how he couldn't even say let's go without everyone just hearing let's go.

------------------------------------------

The two walked in a comfortable silence as they followed Jackie down the road.

"We shouldn't let her get too far away," Rose said biting her bottom lip as she watched Jackie, who remained a good distance in front of them.

"How much trouble can she get into? Especially when I have the jeopardy friendly Tyler back here with me?" he asked giving Rose an impish look.

"I am not jeopardy friendly."

"Oh, of course you are. Of all the people I've known in my life, and that's quite a few mind you, Iyou/I are the most jeopardy friendly of them all."

She shook her head good naturedly and decided it was pointless to argue with the infuriatingly stubborn man.

"I suppose you do this kind of thing a lot though, don't you?" he asked, his hands shoved into his pockets and eyes fixed on his red trainers. "Working for Torchwood and all?"

She watched him out of the corner of her eye for a moment before answering. "A bit, yeah," the way he bit out the word Torchwood made it rather clear that he didn't really want to talk about this, or maybe he just didn't want to think about her working for the group that essentially had been the reason they were torn away from each other.

"Not as often as I did with you though," she added after a moment of tense silence from him.

"No?"

She shook her head as he glanced up from the ground. "Turns out the world isn't in danger of being destroyed or taken over on a daily basis," she explained.

"Isn't it?"

She shook her head again. "Not unless you're around. You've got a knack for getting into trouble like no one else. So, really, which one of us is the jeopardy friendly one?" she asked smirking at him. "Really, this is tame compared to what usually pops up with you around," she finished gesturing around them

The Doctor grinned and opened his mouth, a no doubt witty retort at the ready, but was cut off by a scream. The Doctor and Rose both turned towards where the scream had come from as Jackie spun around to stare at them.

As another screams followed a slow scowl started to work its way onto the Doctor's face. He chose to ignore Rose's pointed look of triumph as her point was proven. "Yup, that's more like it," he said as he sprinted off toward the screams.

"Mum, stay here where it's safe!" Rose shouted as she pursued the Doctor, ready to tell him off for running toward screaming which was obviously far more dangerous than merely following a single, walking, non-screaming woman.

"Why are we running Itowards/I the screaming?" Jackie shouted as she began to chase after the both of them, completely ignoring Rose's order.

"Mum, stay!" Rose shouted over her shoulder as she continued after the Doctor.

The screaming died abruptly which made them all slow down. The Doctor looked around worriedly as he tried to pinpoint the last place the screaming had come from, or something that would have caused the screaming in the first place. After a moment of seemingly aimless turning, the Doctor took off down a small side street.

Rose groaned as she watched the Doctor dash around a corner and vanish from sight. She ran after him again, this time a little faster to try and catch up. As she turned the corner, she stopped abruptly when she found the Doctor knelt down next to a man, his fingers held against the man's neck.

"He was electrocuted," the Doctor told her, looking up from the crumpled form of the man on the street.

Rose slowly walked up to them as she kept a wary eye out for anything around them. "How?"

The Doctor shook his head absentmindedly as he stood up.

"That was a woman screaming earlier, not him," Rose said. "That means there are other people out here."

The Doctor gave Rose a hard look as he struggled with himself. Looking around to try and figure out why fairytales were coming alive was one thing; a dead body was another one entirely. On one hand, he desperately wanted her as far away from danger as possible, because if anything happened to her, his whole reason for being in a parallel universe vanished. On the other hand, he didn't want to let her out of his sight because, all joking aside, she really did get into more trouble when left on her own.

His mind made up the Doctor turned to tell Rose to take her mother and find somewhere safe until he could figure this all out. Unfortunately, he never got around to saying it as another scream wrenched the air. The three stood in silence for a moment waiting to hear if another would sound.

"That was definitely this way," Rose said pointing down another road when another scream never came.

The Doctor grabbed her hand tightly and started down the road. "And stay close, Jackie," he muttered out.

A large stone building, if one could call it that since it seemed to currently resemble a castle far more than the building the Doctor vaguely remembered seeing when they had first entered the town, greeted them as the three came to the end of the road. The tall, and rather imposing, structure was near the center of the town and its heavy oak doors stood in front of them dauntingly.

The Doctor looked around almost desperately. "Where are you?" he asked no one in particular. He suddenly stopped and slowly turned his head back around, tilting it as he did so.

"Maybe whoever it was got away?" Rose said hopefully.

"Away from what?" Jackie asked angrily as she panted for breath.

"Shhh, listen!" the Doctor hissed as he looked down the road towards where the edge of the forest could be seen. "Do you hear that?"

"I don't hear anything." Jackie whispered as they all stared down the road towards where the Doctor was looking.

"Just listen."

The sound of a low and constant thumping quietly came into focus. The sound was faint which made it hard to tell which direction it was coming from.

Jackie searched around them as she tried to figure out where the sound was coming from. "What is that?"

"It…it almost sounds like footsteps." Rose whispered.

The Doctor shook his head as he continued to focus on the road, his hand tightening around Rose's. "Whatever it is, it's getting closer."

"Run!" an unexpected voice shouted out from behind them. The three jumped in surprise at the sudden voice. They quickly spun around to find a small group of seven scrambling out of the alley between two homes just behind them.

The Doctor dropped Rose's hand as his plunged into his front pocket. He pulled out the sonic screwdriver and pointed the end of it at the large doors of the building next to them, the lock clicking open with at the buzz of the device. He pushed one of the heavy doors open and turned back towards the group. "Go," he told Rose hurriedly as he jerked his head towards the door, the ominous thumping becoming louder by the second. "All of you hurry inside!" he shouted waving the group in after them.

Once inside the Doctor shut the door and quickly waved the sonic over the lock all the while the thumping noise grew louder and louder.

"That won't stop them," a heavy set man from the group said distractedly.

"Well, it'll slow 'em down," the Doctor responded vaguely as he turned towards the rest of the noisy group as they huddled together in the middle of the large entry way they had just come into, his sonic screwdriver still clutched in his hand.

"What's going on? What're you all running from?" Jackie asked the frantic group anxiously as the Doctor came to stand next to her and Rose.

"We were going to the caves and they just came out of nowhere," a woman near them said, her voice hitching in fear as the words left her.

"Who did? Who came out of nowhere?" Rose asked almost nervously.

The woman opened her mouth but whatever she had been about to tell them was cut off as the panicked talking of the group died down completely leaving nothing but the heavy thumping from before. She just looked at them in mild horror and shook her head in disbelief. She slowly inched her way back as others in the group desperately started to move away from the large front doors as the sound grew closer.

The Doctor slowly moved forward, Rose and Jackie just a few steps behind him, his head tilted and brow furrowed as he tried to make out the sounds. Footsteps, Rose had been right before, the rhythmic pounding was definitely footsteps.

"That sound…" Rose murmured, the words almost completely lost in the cacophony of panic from the townspeople behind them. "I know that sound."

"That doesn't make sense," the Doctor said as he continued to move towards the door, his eyes fixed on the small sliver of light that was streaming in from beneath the door. Dark shadows played across the light as the thudding grew even louder. "It can't be."

"But…" Jackie said her voice shaking slightly, "but Doctor…it's impossible. They're all gone!" She finished. Her eyes fixed on the floor right along with the Doctor's as the sound of something heavy smashing against the wood doors assaulted their ears. The large double doors shook and creaked under the attack.

The Doctor stood with Rose and Jackie several feet behind him and silently pleaded for everyone to be wrong even though he knew they weren't. His eyes never looked away from light that was becoming ever more blocked out beneath the door even as his mind raced to try and make sense of what was happening.

It didn't make any sense. Fairytales and everyone speaking different languages but understanding each other was one thing but it didn't have anything to do with them.

"Doctor!" Jackie shouted to the man standing in front of her as the doors shuddered ever more violently. "What do we do?"

The door finally flew open, small splinters of wood flying into the air and crashing into the body of the figure that had smashed the door open, though it wouldn't have affected him at all.

"You will upgrade or be deleted," the three Cybermen said in unison, their robotic voices sending a cold shiver down the Doctor's spine.

~TBC


	10. Chapter 10

Title: Into the Woods (10/20)  
Pairing: TenII/Rose  
Rating: PG  
Genre: Action/adventure, romance, drama (just a smidge)  
Spoilers: Just to be safe let's say everything up to JE.  
Disclaimer: I don't own them and I make no money off of them (if anything it's the other way around)  
Summary: After being left on the beach the Doctor, Rose and Jackie are forced to stay overnight in a small Norway village until they can get home, but something strange is happening in the quiet town.  
Authors Note: Half way there, granted I've added an interlude and an epilogue...not sure if I should change the numbering for the whole story though.

Thank you to my amazing beta **mik109** who is made of epic!win.

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Time seemed to stand still or maybe her brain didn't want to make sense of what was going on because it was just so unbelievably wrong. The three Cybermen stood in the doorway. Their fronts lost in the shadows of the full midday sun beaming in behind them. Their eyes cast off an eerie red glow that played off the angles of their masks making them even more frightening than normal.

Rose stared at the Cybermen for what felt like forever though it couldn't have been more than a few seconds before her eyes darted back to the Doctor, who stood frozen to the spot in front of her. She lunged forward as the Cybermen raised their arms up ready to fire into the room, her hand latching onto his.

The Doctor's head snapped towards her at the contact, his fingers clenching around hers so tightly it almost hurt. "Run," he told her in a worried whisper, the contact enough to snap him out of his stupor before he looked around the rest of the room. "Run! Everyone run!" he shouted needlessly as the others continued to scramble and pound on the locked doors on the far side of the entryway.

Jackie rushed towards a door just to her left as one of the Cybermen shot at the group in the back. "It's locked!" she shouted over her shoulder as she continued to pull uselessly on the handle.

The Doctor pointed the sonic at the door handle. He pushed Rose in front of him, aiming her towards the now unlocked doorway. The three barreled through the door as fast as they could move. The Cybermen closest to them turned to take aim at the Doctor as he spun around to slam the door shut behind them.

He quickly relocked the door before spinning back towards Rose and Jackie. "We need to keep moving," he said as he pushed past them, making sure to school his features against the sound of blasts and screams that was coming from the other side of the door. There was nothing any of them could do for the group now. They were lucky to have escaped themselves.

Rose stood rigidly. Her eyes fixed on the door they had just come through. She had been forced to do a lot of hard things in her time working for Torchwood. She'd made mistakes and decisions that had cost people their lives. She hadn't been fast enough or smart enough to save everyone and she knew that sometimes the only thing that can be done is to save oneself. That never made it any easier though.

The sound of metal smashing against wood echoed through the hallway they had locked themselves in and broke Rose out of her thoughts. The door shuddered and began to shake violently as the Cybermen who had taken aim at them began to bash it down. Rose jumped back at the sound as the buzz of the sonic screwdriver joined the sound of smashing wood.

Rose turned to find the Doctor quickly ushering Jackie though another door he had just unlocked.

"Come on! The more doors we put between us and them the better!"

She nodded absentmindedly as she followed her mother into the next room. The new door quickly shut behind the Doctor just as the first glimpse of the Cyberman's fist began to appear in the previous door.

"What are Cybermen doing here?" Jackie asked frantically as she stared at the door. "I thought they were all destroyed, pulled into the void along with the Daleks back at Canary Warf!" she shouted flinching with each strike of the Cyberman's fists as they continued to beat down the door.

"Those weren't Cybermen," the Doctor said as finished locking the door to the room with the sonic screwdriver. He spun around and quickly began looking for a way out that wouldn't take them right back into danger.

"What do you mean those weren't Cybermen? Course they were Cybermen! I know what Cybermen look like an' that was them!" Jackie shouted angrily as the Doctor frantically flitted about the room.

Rose shook her head as she turned away from the door to look at her mother. "Their eyes, I've never seen that before… they had red eyes. What does that mean?" she asked the Doctor.

He fixed her with a hard stare. "I don't know," he sighed and ran a hand through his hair angrily. "Cybermen don't have red eyes…oh those thing might look and sound and act like Cybermen but they aren't."

"How can that be?" Rose asked again, her eyes moving back to the door.

The Doctor shook his head, even though Rose wouldn't see the gesture, before pushing himself away from the wall angrily. Not a window or a door in the entire room. Not even a large vent they could crawl through. He fought back the urge to growl because that wouldn't reassure anyone, least of all one of the Tyler women, that he would be able to save them.

He was seconds away from viciously kicking the wall. It wasn't fair to get her back after all of that time only to lose her again so soon…especially to them, whatever they were. He whipped around to glare at the door. Lock or no lock the wood of that door would prove a poor barrier when that Cyberman reached it.

The sounds of the Cyberman's approach were getting too close to ignore any longer. He stepped forward so that when it finally broke down the door he could try to convince it that they were willing to upgrade. So what if that plan hadn't worked the last time he'd been cornered by Cybermen, and he didn't have a slowly recharging TARDIS power cell to save the day this time. He still had to try.

He exhaled furiously. Desperately pleading with himself to think up something brilliant, he kicked the floor which was when he noticed the carpet wasn't actually a carpet. The Doctor spun in place eagerly noting that the carpet didn't reach any of the walls, which meant it was merely a large area rug.

"Oh, please, let me be that lucky," he muttered to himself as he crouched down and pulled back on one of its edges. "HA!" he shouted triumphantly causing Rose and Jackie to spin towards him as he tugged the rug back even further revealing a trapdoor, a very old and seemingly forgotten trapdoor.

"Let's make our exit, shall we?" he grinned at Rose as he trained the sonic screwdriver on the latch of the door. The buzz of the sonic filled the room yet the door remained stubbornly stuck in place.

"What? Why didn't that work?" he asked crouching down so he could get a closer look at the door. "Right, well then," he said to himself glaring at the offending latch that did very little to keep the door shut since it also didn't do anything to open it. He glanced up as the sound of the Cyberman's footsteps grew closer and closer.

He aimed the sonic back down at the trap door, this time pointing at one of the two rusted over hinges. The resultant metallic ting went unnoticed by everyone but him. He jumped up and grabbed Rose's wrist. "Come on," he muttered to her, gently pulling her until she stood on the piece of wood that made up the trapdoor. "You too, Jackie," he barked as he trained the sonic on the remaining hinge.

"Wait, Doctor, where's this gonna take us?" Jackie asked as she came to stand next to the pair already on top of the trapdoor, the final hinge groaning at the weight of them all.

"Down," he answered as he flipped the sonic on.

The sound of wood beginning to splinter under the weight of metal fists, a second quiet ting from the remaining hinge and Jackie's question of 'Down where?' all mixed together as the trapdoor dropped open. The three fell through the now gaping hole in the floor of the room with a startled yelp and some vulgar shouting.

The door finally relented under the weight of the Cyberman above as the three collided rather unceremoniously with the ground a floor beneath their previous location.

The Doctor waved a hand in front of him, trying to clear away some of the dust that had been kicked into the air thanks to their quick decent and very hard landing. He looked up into the room they had just left to make sure the Cyberman wasn't planning on following them down, not that he expected it too.

Once sufficiently certain the Cyberman had decided to move along, the Doctor turned to look around the room they had fallen into. It was a simple room, if a bit austere. The entire room was made up of old stone bricks and a crude mortar that definitely worked with the currently evolving medieval theme of the outside of the building.

There were six walls total, the four that made up the bulk of the room and a narrow portion that jutted out from it just behind him. A narrow staircase filled that extra section leading up to the main floor of the building. He took a small step back to glance up the staircase, an uneasy breath of air huffing out when he saw a thick wooden door at the top of the stairway still firmly latched shut. He took a moment to flick the sonic towards it, the firm sound of the lock sliding into place relaxing him even further.

He turned back towards his companions. "Everyone alright?" he called out as he tried to make out which lump on the floor was Rose and which was Jackie in the darkness.

"I'm fine," Jackie said with a small cough. "No thanks to you…'down'," she mocked as she tried to clean off some of the dust that had collected on her trousers.

"Fine," Rose added as she shook her hand to try and get rid of the annoying new stinging sensation. She sighed quietly to herself; leave it to the Doctor to land completely unscathed while she landed in a load of rubbish in a basement successfully smashing her hand in the process.

The Doctor nodded at them both before returning to his inspection of the small dark room they had fallen into. There had to be some other way out. Jackie groaned quietly as she rubbed her wrist. Rose finally righted herself but she shook her head a little and leaned back to brace herself against a wall as her vision swam and the whole room started to spin before her.

"Well, we're definitely in the basement…" the Doctor stated as he took in the mostly bare walls, their only light source cast from the trapdoor above them. "Are there any fairytales that involve a basement? Most of them take place in castles or cottages…sometimes caves."

Jackie did what any sensible person in her position would do at a time like this, which was to completely ignore the Doctor. She had more important things to do than listen to him prattle on about basements. First, she needed to check on her daughter, who was currently a great deal less sturdy on her feet than she had been just moments before. "Rose? Are you alright?" she asked quietly as she began to move towards her.

"Just…just give me a mo, yeah?"

Jackie's face scrunched up in worry as she appraised her daughter. "What's wrong, sweetheart?"

Rose shook her head again as she leaned of her weight even more on the wall behind her. Everything was swimming and her mother's words sounded like they were coming from another planet instead of right next to her. "I…my head…"

"Doctor!"

The Doctor stopped going on about the lack of basements in medieval Germany and thus the lack of their presence in fairytales and turned to look at Jackie. "What?" he asked before glancing at Rose. The instant his eyes landed on her his mouth snapped shut and he started to rush towards her with worry, confusion and just a hint of the good ole Oncoming Storm brewing in his eyes. "Rose? What is it? What's wrong?"

"Doctor…" she began, her voice sounding muffled and weak even to her. Before she could finish whatever she had been planning on saying, she began to collapse.

The Doctor caught her as she began to fall forwards. "Rose! Rose…No, no, no, no, no," he gently lowered her to the ground, cradling her upper body against his. "Rose?"

"I don't feel so good," she whispered as she stared up into his frantic eyes.

"What happened?" he asked her, his words whispered and shaky. He had just gotten her back. He was going to get to spend forever with her. He couldn't lose forever with her before he had even had a chance to enjoy it.

She gave him another one of her adorably confused faces as her eyes slowly started to shut. "No! Rose, stay with me," he practically screamed at her as he shook her slightly making her eyes snap back open. "Rose, you have to tell me what happened. You have to tell me so I can fix it," he begged her, almost on the verge of tears. Rose gave him a small hum of understanding as she closed her eyes once again. "Rose…no!" he shook her body once again but her eyes stayed firmly shut.

"Rose!"

~TBC


	11. Chapter 11

Title: Into the Woods (11/22)  
Pairing: TenII/Rose  
Rating: PG  
Genre: Action/adventure, romance, drama (just a smidge)  
Spoilers: Just to be safe let's say everything up to JE.  
Disclaimer: I don't own them and I make no money off of them (if anything it's the other way around)  
Summary: After being left on the beach the Doctor, Rose and Jackie are forced to stay overnight in a small Norway village until they can get home, but something strange is happening in the quiet town.  
Authors Note: I've decided to just include the interlude and epilogue into the number of chapters for this fic. It's easier this way. Also I want to say I'm sorry now because I just realized that when I broke the chapters down I ended up with a lot of cliffhangers.

Thank you to my amazing beta **mik109** who is sick right now so I'm sending her get well now vibes.

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The Doctor cradled Rose's body to his own. He gulped back an angry scream, or maybe it was a sob, he wasn't quite sure at the moment, as he raised a shaky hand to Rose's neck and searched for a pulse. When he was met with a steady beat, he let out a shaky breath he hadn't known he was holding in. Well that was something, wasn't it? His head snapped to the side, his eyes fixed on Jackie. "Jackie! What happened?"

"I don't know!" she all but shouted at him, her eyes never leaving Rose's face. "She was just fine a second ago, an' then she got up and she looked like she was going to fall over again."

"Before that!"

"Don't yell at me! She's my daughter. If either of us should be yelling, it should be me yelling at you!" she countered angrily. She chose to focus on how very mad she should be with the man that was currently cradling her unconscious daughter's body to his own like it was some kind of lifeline. The anger was more comforting than the uncertainty and more useful.

"Well think, Jackie!" he shouted, his voice more pleading then angry. "Before she stood up, before we fell, before we even got into this bloody house."

"I don't know!" she shouted back angrily though it started to edge on panic. She turned away from the Doctor, who was still cradling the unconscious Rose to his chest.

The Doctor pulled out his sonic screwdriver and scanned it over Rose. "She's fine…breathing is normal, brain activity is normal…" he said more to himself than Jackie. "I can't find anything wrong with her…" he said, the hand that held the sonic screwdriver falling limply to his side.

"Oh, you've got to be kidding me!"

He spun towards Jackie anxiety clearly written across his face, "What? What is it?"

"It's a spinning wheel!" Jackie exclaimed, gesturing angrily towards what looked more like a long forgotten wooden bicycle wheel than anything else. He looked at her a little confused. "When we fell, she shook her hand like it hurt. I figured she just landed on it, but there's a spinning wheel over here."

The Doctor looked from Jackie to the spinning wheel she was still angrily pointing at and back before settling on Rose's unconscious form in his arms. "Another fairytale," he muttered.

"Sleeping Beauty…" Jackie said as she walked over to the two. She crouched down next to them and turned over Rose's left hand. "See? Its cut," she explained as the pair inspected Rose's index finger, a shallow cut running along the pad.

"The girl who fell asleep for a hundred years," he said as he stared at Rose's sleeping face.

"Did she? I thought it was 'til Prince Charming woke her up."

The Doctor shook his head, "That's Snow White."

"You sure about that? I thought Snow White was woken up by her true love's first kiss."

"Yes, Jackie, I'm sure. Sleeping Beauty was cursed by a witch to die and another witch changed the curse so she would just sleep for a hundred years," he replied angrily as he glared at her. "And that's not how Snow White woke up either."

Jackie stared at the Doctor whose gaze had already returned to Rose as he seemed unable to take his eyes off her for longer than a few seconds. "Well," she started calmly, "you need to kiss her," Jackie said simply, no point in beating around the bush after all.

The Doctor's head snapped up and he gaped at Jackie for a moment. "I…what?"

"To wake her up."

"Jackie, that won't…" he began to say before he thought better of it. "That's not how Sleeping Beauty woke up."

"Yes, it is. Prince Charming's kiss broke the spell."

"He didn't kiss her," the Doctor tried explaining once again as his gaze searched around the room once again, anything to not be facing Jackie at that moment.

"Yes he did."

"Jackie, do you remember when I told you that the fairytales have changed over the years? That they've been watered down? Sleeping Beauty wasn't woken up with a kiss, not in the original telling. You can just trust me on that."

"What did he do then?" she asked cautiously, not sure she liked the tone his voice had taken.

"Let's just say a little more…blood circulation was necessary."

"OH!" Jackie shouted in disgust. "Don't even think about doin' that!" She barked out.

"I wasn't planning on it, Jackie!" he shot back just as angrily.

She stared at him for a long moment wondering how true that statement was. She had seen the way the two of them looked at each other and she truly doubted that he hadn't once thought about her daughter in a more 'blood circulation' type of way. Granted she was even surer that bringing a twisted fairytale to life hadn't, or would ever have, entered into those thoughts.

Before Jackie had a chance to tell him he might as well try and kiss her because they didn't have anything to lose, the sound of something slamming against wood echoed through the darkened basement.

Jackie spun around and looked towards the narrow staircase that hugged the right side of the basement waiting for whatever it was that had made the sound to appear. She strained to hear the sound of metallic feet stomping towards them but was greeted by nothing more than silence and that eerie quiet was almost as frightening as actually hearing the Cybermen would have been.

The Doctor had mentioned something about how there weren't any fairytales he knew of that took place in a basement but his knowledge on the subject matter was bound to be limited, even though he did seem to know a disturbing amount about Sleeping Beauty in particular. Plus, it was a whole new universe, maybe in this world there were fairytales that took place in the basement, really horrible ones too, where everyone is killed by dark shadowy figures.

Just when Jackie felt herself relaxing again, and releasing a breath she hadn't realized she had been holding, another slam broke the quiet. It was definitely the Cybermen again. She jumped slightly at the sound before she began to slowly move away from the stairs, inching her way back to stand next to the Doctor, who was still seated on the floor with Rose cradled in his arms.

"We need to get out of here," the Doctor murmured quietly.

"Not exactly a great escape plan then, coming down here," Jackie said as she looked around the bleak basement. "Not like there's an easy way out is there?"

The Doctor sighed darkly. "This is an old building…a very old building," he said though Jackie was almost certain he had been talking to himself. "And it's bigger than the others. A large, very old, building…with trapdoors," he continued to mutter as his eyes flicked up towards the trapdoor they'd fallen through. He groaned and ran a hand through his hair angrily. "Jackie! This building, it's bigger and older than all of the other ones around it. Right?"

Jackie shook her head, baffled by his question. "I don't know…sure," she answered getting a nod from him. "Why?" she asked him before her head snapped back towards the stairs as another slam filled the air.

"Because," he started as he gently shifted Rose away from him so he could get up, ignoring the slamming as best he could. "Norway, well the Norway in the other universe, was made up of petty kingdoms that were inhabited by Vikings before it became united," he began to explain as he moved towards the far wall of the basement. "That lot were constantly bickering and fighting and invading each other's towns and cities for centuries," he continued to explain as turned away from the far wall to begin blindly searching a different one. "So if this building is as old as it looks that means it's been around for hundreds of years. Back then towns would build a place they could go, like a town hall, in case of an attack and on occasion they would include escape routes."

"Oh! Like a secret tunnel?" Jackie asked quickly as she turned towards another wall in search of some sort of entrance.

"Exactly," the Doctor said as he ran his hands across the last wall on his side of the basement. "If they have one, it should be able to get us out of here."

Jackie nodded as she continued to search the wall in front of her. She glanced over her shoulder towards the stairs as another slam filled the room. The noises were getting stronger and she knew it was only a matter of time until those Cybermen, or whatever they were, found their way into the basement.

She took a deep breath before turning back to the wall. She was never one to work well under pressure, she thought as the slamming grew closer, and this whole hero thing was definitely not all it was cracked up to be. Her fingers slid along the mostly smooth stones that made up the wall in front of her.

This was great, she thought bitterly, stuck in Norway with a part alien and an unconscious daughter as not-really-Cybermen were stomping their way down to kill them all and here she was searching a wall for a secret tunnel. She didn't even know what she should be looking for. What did secret tunnel entrances look like anyhow?

She huffed out angrily, blowing her bangs out of her eyes as she leaned back to glare at the wall. She turned to see how the Doctor was doing. When she saw him push himself away from the wall in front of him angrily, she decided it wasn't going too well for him either.

Jackie slowly turned to look back at the wall in front of her when she noticed something odd just out of the corner of her eye. It was subtle really. She never would have noticed it had their lives not depended on it. "Doctor," she began to ask slowly, "what exactly does an escape route door look like?"

"It could look like any number of things, Jackie," the Doctor groaned as his eyes started to nervously glance up the stairs. Those things would be at that door any moment now and there was no telling how long it would last against them, especially if there was more than one.

"Would it look just like the wall except the bricks wouldn't be all staggered and it'd have a bit of a gap going around it?" she asked hopefully, her eyes focused on the tall, thin, rectangle of bricks along the wall next to her.

The Doctor's head instantly snapped towards Jackie before landing on the wall she was staring at. A slow smile began to work its way across his face as he quickly joined her on the other side of the room. "Brilliant."

Jackie's happy reply was cut off by the cracking of wood as the Cybermen finally began their assault on the door leading into the basement. "Get it open," Jackie demanded, her eyes refusing to move away from the stairway.

The Doctor nodded mutely as he turned back towards the secret door. He ran his hand along one edge of the doorway before finally wedging his fingers into the gap. "It won't open!" he grunted as he pulled on the doorway.

"How can it not open?" Jackie asked worriedly.

"These things haven't been used for hundreds of years, Jackie," the Doctor grumbled as he continued to pull on the lip of the door. "In case you didn't know it, doors tend to stick after that much time," he finished shoving away from the wall crossly.

He took a step back and stared at the expanse of stone and mortar for a moment before striding forward again. This time, instead of hooking his fingers into the small joint between the edge of the wall and the lip of the doorway, he pushed against it.

The stone doorway slowly began to swing open.

"Hurry!" Jackie pleaded with the door as she started to push against it alongside the Doctor. The smashing began to sound less and less like it was through a solid piece of wood and more like it was through a layer of splinters.

The Doctor jerked his head towards what they had opened of the door, which was barely enough for him to get past, let alone for her to squeeze through. "Go, Jackie."

Jackie stayed firmly in place even though she stopped pushing as the Doctor continued to struggle with the heavy doorway. "What about Rose?"

"I'll get her. Just go," he stated when Jackie hesitated for a moment as she turned to look at Rose peacefully sleeping in the middle of the basement. "Jackie!" he shouted, his voice cutting through the thoughts running rapid fire through her brain. She pushed her way past him and wriggled through the opening into the tunnel.

The sudden pitch black of the tunnel in front of her was a harsh contrast even after the barely lit basement. She stumbled blindly through the dark, her hands held out in front of her, as she quickly made her way forward.

Her hands smashed against a solid surface directly in front of her. Whatever she had just run into was solid and mostly smooth. Its surface was gritty even though it was cool to the touch, and it seemed to span the entire width of the tunnel.

Jackie grumbled to herself as she continued to try and make out the surface in front of her, which would have gone a lot quicker had the tunnel not been in complete darkness. "Oh, stupid!" she groaned at herself as she dug into her pocket to pull out her cell phone. She held the phone in front of her allowing the light from its screen to wash across the surface of the barrier in front of her.

"Doctor!" she shouted turning back to see the Doctor starkly silhouetted against the pale light of the basement as he continued to slowly push the doorway open far enough so he could carry Rose through. "There's another door down here!" she shouted back to him. "A metal one," she explained to him as she turned back towards it, moving her phone to get a better look at the rest of the door, "with a proper lock an' everything."

The Doctor turned to glance back towards the stairway behind him as the Cybermen continued to work on breaking down the door. Then his gaze moved to where Rose was lying in the pool of light from the trapdoor above.

"I can't get it open," Jackie's voice came from behind him.

He had finally opened the door just enough that he could fit through it while carrying Rose, well maybe. It didn't matter though because the Cybermen would be through the door any second now and it wouldn't take them long to get down the stairs and start after them down the tunnel because there was no way he'd be able to shut the entrance to it in time to keep them from following, even if Jackie helped push it closed.

However, if there was a metal door down there that could lock, then it was their best chance of getting away from the Cybermen and preventing them from following. It would be easier to unlock the door now, without being weighed down by Rose. All they would have to do was get past that door and they'd be safe.

The Doctor took one last look at Rose before sprinting down the tunnel towards Jackie. He flicked the sonic screwdriver to life and pointed it at the lock on the doorway as he joined Jackie. The sound of a bar lock sliding open echoed through the small tunnel and together the Doctor and Jackie pushed the heavy, though far less so than the stone door they had just been pushing, door open.

Once the door was open, the Doctor spun around and started to run back towards Rose. He slid to a stop as the basement came into view. He was too late. The Cybermen had already made their way inside.


	12. Chapter 12

Title: Into the Woods (12/22)  
Pairing: TenII/Rose  
Rating: PG  
Genre: Action/adventure, romance, drama (just a smidge)  
Spoilers: Just to be safe let's say everything up to JE.  
Disclaimer: I don't own them and I make no money off of them (if anything it's the other way around)  
Summary: After being left on the beach the Doctor, Rose and Jackie are forced to stay overnight in a small Norway village until they can get home, but something strange is happening in the quiet town.  
Authors Note: I don't actually have anything to say, which is odd for me.

Thank you to my amazing beta **mik109** I love ya.

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One Cyberman stood next to Rose, his head tilted down towards her as though he were trying to understand what she was doing, while the other two made their way towards the tunnel opening.

Upon seeing the Doctor, the two Cybermen lifted up their arms, identical calls of 'delete' following the action. The third Cybermen turned and began to make his way towards the Doctor as well, ignoring Rose entirely now.

The Doctor flattened himself against the wall of the tunnel to dodge the Cybermen's shots, barely noting the muffled shout from Jackie as she doubtlessly did the same. He pointed the sonic at the heavy wooden rail that ran across the top of the tunnel's opening. The screwdriver buzzed to life and the rail split in two, sending the doorway and ruble smashing down and effectively blocking out the passageway from the Cybermen entirely. It also completely blocked him off from Rose but there wasn't time to dwell on that for now.

Jackie gasped as the entrance collapsed the evil red glow of the Cybermen's eyes the last thing she saw before the tunnel was plunged into completely darkness again. She inhaled shakily as she felt the Doctor move up beside her and begin pushing the metal door shut behind him.

"Doctor," she whispered anxiously as he slid the lock into place, "we can't just leave…" she trailed off as he looked at her with a mixture of anger and disgust for himself clearly written on his face even in the dark.

"We have to," he commanded sternly as he began to make his way down the tunnel.

"But…Doctor!" she shouted angrily as she followed after him. "We can't leave her with those Cybermen."

"They aren't Cybermen, Jackie!" the Doctor yelled back as he whipped around furiously. He just as quickly turned away from her again, burying his face in his hands and breathing in a deep, uneven breath. "She'll be fine," he ground out hoarsely as he tried to get a hold of himself, leaving Jackie to wonder if he was talking to her or to himself.

"They didn't want her," he slowly explained as he turned, his hands dropping to his sides listlessly, "whatever those are, they didn't care about her. They were more interested in us," he said as his eyes moved to stare at the door he had shut behind them. He took another deep breath before meeting her eyes. "You have to know I would never -"

"I know," Jackie cut him off suddenly, a little ashamed of herself for having blamed him even if only for a moment. She knew the Doctor well enough to realize that had Rose been in any danger, even just a little bit of it really, nothing would have stopped him from getting to her, least of all some not-really-Cybermen.

"I'll get her back, Jackie," he stated determinedly.

She looked at him for a long moment, slightly taken aback by the look in his eye. Rose had told her once that the Dalek's called him the 'Oncoming Storm', a fact she had balked at because she could never picture the Doctor as anything more than a daft alien who happened to save the world all of the time. The man standing before her was definitely not just a daft alien and she knew he wasn't merely promising her that he would save her daughter; he was stating it, because nothing would keep him from getting her back and Jackie knew it.

"Course you will, you daft man," she spoke suddenly as the overwhelming need to thank him swelled up inside of her. She chose to ignore the feeling however, so she could focus on making sure he wasn't falling into a pit of self-loathing for having left Rose behind in the first place. "You save people it's what you do. Sides, she's been through worse than this and come out just fine thanks to you."

The Doctor gave her a sad smile. "Thank you, Jackie."

She gave him a tight smile and nodded. "We just need to keep focused and figure it out. That's what Rose was always saying when something went wrong, didn't matter if it was the end of the world or running out of milk."

The Doctor eyed Jackie wearily as she tried to hide the fact that her voice hitched faintly. He had to admit she did have a point. They wouldn't get any answers, and they certainly wouldn't be able to save Rose, by sulking. They'd have to be strong and, as much as he hated to admit it, work together if they wanted to get anything done. It was a strange, and slightly uneasy, truce they were going to have to strike.

"So that way then?" she asked, forcefully chipper given their current situation, as she turned to look down the dark tunnel before them.

The Doctor turned to look down the tunnel, frowning for a moment as he did so. "Hang on. Are you using your mobile to light the tunnel?"

"What else am I gonna use? Not like I have a torch."

"Wait..." he muttered as he began to dig around his coat pockets. With a triumphant 'ha' he pulled a medium sized torch out of it. He flicked the switch sending the light spilling into the darkness of the tunnel, blinding them both for a brief moment. "That's more like it."

"You had a torch in your jacket pocket?" Jackie asked skeptically, not sure she believed what she had just seen.

"Yup," the Doctor answered, popping the p sound, in an attempt at normality, as he turned to start walking down the tunnel.

"Is everything of yours bigger than it looks on the outside?" she asked incredulously.

The Doctor shifted uncomfortably in front of Jackie for a moment. "So that way then?" he asked in an equally forced jovial manner to the one she had used only moments earlier as he began to make his way down the tunnel and towards their escape.

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The Doctor blinked against the bright light spilling through the crack between the door and the wall of the tunnel, his eyes scanning the surrounding area just outside the heavy metal door quickly. The tunnel had brought them close to the edge of town, only three rows of homes stood between the tunnel exit and the trees of the forest straight ahead.

There were no signs of any Cybermen or any trolls, goblins, witches or other fairytale what-have-you's, but that didn't mean they weren't there. He shifted uneasily as he glanced around the surrounding area again.

"Shift over will ya?" Jackie asked impatiently from just behind him, her voice cutting through the silence.

His back went rigid at the sound of her voice. "Jackie," he whispered harshly as he turned to glare down at her. "I am trying to be covert. That's why I unlocked the door so slowly and why I barely opened it after I got it unlocked."

"An' I can't see a thing," she shot back at him, this time at least making sure to whisper like he had.

"There's nothing ito/i see, Jackie," the Doctor grunted indignantly as Jackie shoved her shoulder into his chest rather violently in her attempt to make him move away from the door.

"Then it won't kill ya to move over a bit will it?" she huffed angrily as she shifted again. The Doctor grumbled as she finally pushed her way just in front of him so she could peer through the narrow opening of the doorway.

He glared down at the top of Jackie's head as she took her time surveying the area just outside the tunnel. It wasn't that he was against her looking out of the gap, and, yes, she was a good deal shorter than he was so she did nothing to hinder his line of site, but that wasn't the point. The point was he had been in this situation a few more times than she had and he would therefore recognize danger first.

The Doctor had just been about to say something along those lines. Well, by along those lines, he meant his whole plan had been to tell her to 'go away'. However, a figure came into view before them at that very moment. He clamped his mouth shut and heard Jackie inhale quickly as the Cyberman marched past their hiding place.

As its stomping faded away, Jackie let out shaky breath. "Do you think he's one of the one's from inside?"

The Doctor shook his head mutely as he strained his ears in an attempt to hear if another one was coming.

"Is this what it's like travelin' with you?" Jackie asked casually in an attempt to hide any anxiety at their current predicament as well as how curious she was on the matter.

The Doctor stayed silent for a moment as he mulled over the question. When he and Rose traveled together was it mostly running around and ducking out of the way of different hostile aliens as they tried to help save everyone? That was a bit like asking a fish if he liked water. You know what the answer is going to be so asking is a bit redundant. "Mostly…"

"Wonderful, means my daughter's insane."

The Doctor froze at Jackie's response. He didn't know what he had expected from her at his answer. However, a disgusted 'wonderful' had never once crossed his mind as a possible response. "What?" he asked her, honestly baffled by her reply.

"You'd have to be bonkers to want to go an' do this all the time," she said as she backed away from the gap in the door. She looked over her shoulder to the Doctor who was regarding her with a mixture of confusion and indignation. "Don't give me that look either. It's true."

Leave it to Jackie to come up with small talk that still acted as a subtle, or in this case not-so-subtle, insult to him. "Oh, how I missed you, Jackie," he muttered sarcastically under his breath. Suppressing a sigh, he looked over the top of her head and out of the tunnel once again.

Another Cyberman appeared only moments later. The Doctor frowned to himself as the metallic clomping faded away. They were patrolling the area looking for them, which did not bode well for their escape plans. There had been an eleven minute interval between the patrols though, a gap that was bound to be running like clockwork with these lot, and sitting in the tunnel wasn't doing anything to help him find a way to save Rose.

"Come on," the Doctor urged gently as he wedged himself in front of Jackie, "We need to leave before another one comes around," he explained as he slowly pushed the door open.

As the Doctor inched his way out of the tunnel, Jackie nodded and followed closely behind him. It was strangely quiet at the edge of the town. There were no metal footsteps coming up behind them, no sounds of people in the town, not surprising considering the circumstances, no birds singing, which also wasn't surprising considering the number of dead ones they had seen at the edge of the forest. There was no sound beyond them and the wind rustle of the trees.

Jackie sighed nervously before clearing her throat. "Do you know where we're going?"

The Doctor tensed for a moment, but didn't stop walking forward, before answering her. "We'll head towards the forest. See if we can't find that path to lead us to the caves," he whispered still glancing around them cautiously.

"Do you know how far it is?" she asked.

"Jackie, now is not the time to be having a chat," the Doctor snapped at her angrily. "Now, please just….quiet," he finished the sentence as quietly as he could.

After Jackie nodded, he turned back around, his eyes nervously darting around them as they quickly dashed across the empty road between the end of the tunnel and the nearby homes.

Together they crept along the side of one of the homes, making sure to keep ducked down in case they could be seen through the windows. As they reached the end of the home, and subsequently another roadway, the Doctor slowed to a stop. Jackie mimicked his movements, crouching down next to him as he leaned forward carefully so that he could check around the corner. He scanned the next road for any sign of movement and when none caught his eye, he waved Jackie on again.

The pair ran across the empty roadway to the last set of homes between them and the woods both edging along the side of one of the houses. They moved as quickly as they could without drawing much attention to themselves. The Doctor held up his hand, motioning Jackie to stop, as they neared the end of the building.

There was nothing else to hide behind from that point on, just an empty expanse of dirt and grass before the tree line. The Doctor glanced at the area cautiously. Sneaking about on his own was one thing but sneaking about with Jackie Tyler in tow was another. Oh, he could leg it over to the trees with no problem, Cybermen or no, but Jackie was another matter all together. It would only be a matter of time, roughly three minutes and forty-eight seconds to be exact, until another Cyberman made his rounds.

"Right," the Doctor whispered to Jackie, "another Cyberman will be around soon so we'll just have to run this bit."

Jackie fought the urge to sigh and nodded in understanding, really with all the running he did it was no wonder he was as thin as he was. As soon as they got home though, she was going to lay about for a week.

"Just…keep your head low and run really, really, fast," he encouraged her as he spun around to face the forest once again. "Ready?"

"As if I'll ever be ready for this," she muttered darkly behind him.

The Doctor nodded, not really paying attention to what she had said, before he shouted an energetic 'run' to her.

The pair jumped up and shot out from the side of the home and right into the sights of a Cyberman. The Doctor skidded to a halt as the figure raised his arm up readying to fire upon them.

"OH!" Jackie shouted in alarm as she practically collided with the Doctor's back.

"Well, that's not fair, hiding behind a house," the Doctor grumbled as the Cyberman began to march towards the pair.

"You will upgrade or be deleted," informed the Cyberman.

"Yeah, figured as much," he muttered as the Cyberman continued towards them. He eyed the Cyberman warily, its arm moving down to rest by its side. That meant it wasn't planning on shooting them, which also mean it was the perfect opportunity to try and get some information out of them, "Here's a question though, what are a group of Cybermen doing all the way out here in the middle of Norway?" he asked as the Cyberman continued towards them. "More importantly, how are you bringing fairytales to life?"

"You will upgrade or be deleted," the Cyberman repeated as he stopped just in front of them.

"Yes. You said as much, and look we aren't resisting. We'll go with you," he said nodding his head and raising his hands in mock surrender as he took a small step towards the Cyberman. He could feel Jackie glaring at the back of his head as he moved which was a bit rude when you got right down to it seeing as he was devising a cunning escape plan at the moment, he just needed to stall the Cyberman for a bit so he could work out the details of said escape plan.

"Thing is, I've looked around and there's nothing here for you to use to upgrade with," he continued taking another few steps towards the Cyberman. "The people are all hiding so you can't upgrade them, and even if you did find them, they don't have the technology you need. So what are you planning? Why are you doing this? iHow/i are you doing this?" he questioned coming to a stop in front of the Cyberman, his hands falling to his sides.

The Cyberman stood before him unmoving.

"You aren't doing this are you?" he asked, eyeing the Cyberman in front of them impishly as a slow grin spread across his face. "No, this is beyond you. The technology needed to bring things to life takes imagination and feelings. Two things you lot don't have," he said accusingly. "Oh, but you aren't Cybermen are you? Not really," he continued with a sly smirk, hands sliding into his pockets. "So what are you?"

The Doctor stared at the Cyberman, who stared back unmoving. "What no answer?" he inquired condescendingly. "Nothing at all?"

"You will upgrade or be -"

"Deleted. Yes, you've said that," the Doctor groaned exasperatedly. "Several times in fact. Can't you say anything else?" he asked suspiciously as he looked the Cyberman over. "You can't can you?" he asked his small grin replaced by a wide smile. "Oh isn't that just wizard!" he said with a laugh. "You can't answer any of my questions. You can't even say anything else because you're not real."

"Looks pretty real to me," Jackie reminded uneasily from behind the Doctor.

"Oh, but they aren't," the Doctor said with a large smile. "The things these not real things are doing are real enough, but they're just a by-product of something else. Whatever's making the fairytales come to life is making them, too. And do you know what that means, Jackie?" he asked cheerfully.

"Not a clue."

"It means that when I find whatever, Iwhoever/I, it is that's doing this and I stop them," the Doctor explained, his voice hard and angry all of a sudden, "they'll all vanish… Like a bad dream," he finished turning away from the Cyberman to walk back over to Jackie's side.

He looked at Jackie and quickly glanced towards the forest, his head tilting towards it just so in the universal signal of 'we're going to be running off that way in a moment'. Jackie, in turn, frowned at the Doctor before mouthing an annoyed, 'What?'

The Doctor groaned to himself before turning back towards the Cyberman. "You'll have to forgive my…" the Doctor let the sentence trail off as he regarded Jackie for a moment, "whatever she is. She's a bit worthless in situations like this to tell the truth."

"Oy!"

"Honestly, doesn't even understand simple non-verbal signals that tell her what to do to save herself," he continued, ignoring Jackie completely for the time being. "Because you aren't a Cyberman, or real even, I doubt you understand any of what I've just said. No, all you know is that we aren't screaming and trying to get away so you don't have to shoot us, because even if you aren't a Cyberman you are a crude approximation of one and you know they don't shoot people who aren't trying to escape."

"Thing is," the Doctor continued as he tugged on his ear, "we are trying to escape. Which makes this whole situation a bit difficult to work around, doesn't it?" he asked the still unmoving Cyberman in front of them.

"What are you doing?" Jackie hissed out as she elbowed him in the ribs.

"I'm saving us," his tone let her know how ridiculous that question was.

"What by taunting that…thing?"

"There's only one of them and I've done this a fair few times in my life, Jackie. We can outrun it."

"I thought the only reason it wasn't shooting us was because we weren't running."

"Well, just zigzag while you run. They don't have the best aim when they're real. I doubt a fake one is going to do any better."

"I don't think -"

"Good, let's keep it that way," he interrupted her. The death glare he got for the comment made him shift a little uneasily from foot to foot. "C'mon, Jackie, it'll be a normal day in the life of me. Besides, the sooner we get to the caves, the sooner I can figure out what Iis/I causing all of this and save Rose."

Jackie hesitated for a moment before nodding in agreement. "If it's just the one," she said with a small shrug.

The Doctor nodded back at her before turning towards the Cyberman again. "Right, we'll just be off then," he said happily. "Just back up nice and slow, Jackie," he said as they both started to slowly move backwards along the edge of the building and away from the Cyberman. "When we get on the other side of the building, we'll make a run for it."

The two edged their way along the building. The Cyberman in front of them remained unmoving.

"You will upgrade or be deleted!"

The Doctor and Jackie's heads snapped to the side at the loud exclamation. They had backed themselves up past the side of the house where another four Cybermen loomed menacingly.

"Oh, didn't think of that," the Doctor stated honestly as he regarded the new Cybermen. "Umm, Jackie," he said as he turned towards her, "RUN!" he shouted as he grabbed her hand and pulled her along after him.

Jackie glared at the back of the Doctor as he tugged her along huffing in annoyance by how much slower she was than him. "Oh, I didn't miss you at all!"

The Doctor ignored her grumbling as they dashed toward the tree line, zigging and zagging as he had previously explained.

The Cybermen were slow but the blasts from their weapons kept the pair moving well into the forest.

~TBC


	13. Chapter 13

Title: Into the Woods (13/22)  
Pairing: TenII/Rose  
Rating: PG  
Genre: Action/adventure, romance, drama (just a smidge)  
Spoilers: Just to be safe let's say everything up to JE.  
Disclaimer: I don't own them and I make no money off of them (if anything it's the other way around)  
Summary: After being left on the beach the Doctor, Rose and Jackie are forced to stay overnight in a small Norway village until they can get home, but something strange is happening in the quiet town.  
Authors Note: This was supposed to be up this morning but homework got in the way. I promise the next two chapters (an interlude and an actual chapter) will go on Friday morning (right after I give my informative speech on black holes)

Thank you to my amazing beta **mik109** you rock.

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The forest provided little cover near the tree line so they kept running well into the woods. All the while, the Doctor searched for the path to the caves.

"Oy, Doctor! I can't… keep… running!" Jackie protested, panting for breath.

The Doctor slowed to a stop, after all they hadn't been shot in several minutes and he could barely discern the sounds of the pursuing Cybermen from here.

Jackie sagged gratefully, releasing the Doctor's hand. She leaned heavily against a tall tree unsure whether she wanted to merely collapse momentarily or die. Rose really was insane if she missed this.

The Doctor leaned against a tree near Jackie, huffing and puffing right along with her, though not as badly. "Oh, I am really going to miss my respiratory bypass…and my second heart. Things like this used to be a breeze with those. Made me a fabulous runner, stupendous, amazing, fantastic… awe-inspiring even. It also made me really good at snorkeling," he added as an afterthought. "I don't know how you humans do this," he finished turning back towards Jackie.

"Those of us who aren't insane usually don't."

He rolled his eyes and pushed himself up away from the tree. "No time for napping. We need to find those caves. There has to be a path around here somewhere. They didn't just put that tunnel there for show," he began searching the area for any clues, torn fabric or broken twigs, anything to point them in the right direction. Jackie halfheartedly trudged along behind him, still trying to regain her breath.

"Hello, what's this?" asked the Doctor after several moments of aimless wondering as he kneeled down next to some small, out of place pale objects.

She leaned over his back. "Looks like the remainder of someone's picnic to me."

He smiled as he picked up one of the chunks of bread. "That's because it is," he said happily giving her a sly little grin. "After all, Hansel and Gretel will need to get home," he laughed as he jumped up and began following the crumbs.

Jackie sighed. "I hope you're going in the right direction," she muttered as she reluctantly began following him once again. She was about to demand another rest when he shouted.

"Voilà!" the Doctor grinned at her as he stood just outside the rather large opening to a cave. "Let's go meet some townspeople!" he said as he strode excitedly forward into the cavern.

"Course, I'm stuck with the one person in the whole universe that would be excited 'bout going into a big, dark, cave," Jackie muttered darkly as she began to follow him.

"Come along now Jackie, chop chop!" the Doctor shouted back at her as he stood a good distance inside of the cave. "Haven't got all night," he grinned to himself at the irony of being able to say that and mean it even while the sun was up.

"I'm comin'!" Jackie hollered back at him.

As she scrambled into the cave the sound of something smashing somewhere in the forest echoed out.

Jackie paused, halfway to where the Doctor stood inside of the caves opening. She turned around, her eyes scanning the dense woods around them. "You don't think they've followed us do you?"

The Doctor frowned as he watched the woods. "Let's not wait to find out," he muttered darkly eyes darting back towards Jackie. "Common Jackie, move it!"

Jackie sprinted the rest of the way into the cave, darting past the Doctor who moved to follow her. Together they ran into the cave, the light from the mouth of it slowly fading as they moved deeper and deeper into the darkness.

Their pace slowed to a brisk jog as the light faded. Soon the small ray of light from the torch Jackie still held in her hand was the only light in the pitch black of the cave.

As far as hiding places went, it was definitely not an obvious choice the Doctor mused as they weaved their way past large hunks of stone that littered the floor of the caves tunnel. It was damp and the air had a metallic twang to it that you could not only taste but smell too.

The absolute darkness made it nearly impossible to see in front of you, even with the torch on its light barely pierced the dark. It sent ominous shadows dancing across the uneven ground. It glistened with moisture and small pools of water gathered in the lower dips and grooves of the caves floor.

It definitely wasn't the nicest hiding place he had ever been privy to, he thought dryly. Hardly safe at all.

"Ow!" the Doctor grabbed the top of his head, sending an angry glare up at the ceiling of the cave. "Definitely not safe at all," he muttered to himself as he began to scan the floor of the cave looking for what had just hit him. He did a double take as small lump of stone caught his eye. "Hello there," he muttered mostly to himself as he bent down and picked it up.

"What are you doin'?" Jackie called out angrily over her shoulder to him, breathing heavily and deeply thankful for the timeout, not that she was going to tell him that. "We've got Cybermen or whatever chasin' after us an' you're takin' a time out to look at stones."

"Jackie, do you have any idea what this is?" he asked holding the small lump of rock up towards her.

Jackie looked from the rock in his hand towards where the mouth of the cave lied far behind them and back again. "I just said it's a stone."

"It's iron, Jackie, natural iron," he began searching the cave around him almost frantically. "It fell from the ceiling of the cave," he stated, eyes fixed on the wall just behind Jackie. "And that means, if I'm right," he exclaimed jumping up from his crouch and running to the wall behind Jackie. "Which I usually am," he continued as he leaned forward and licked the wall. "YES! Salt!"

"Why do'ya always have to lick things?" Jackie asked in disgust turning away from him. She looked behind her towards the mouth of the cave, searching for any sign of movement, just a bit worried that their pursuers would show up again. "Doctor, the Cybermen."

The Doctor looked over at Jackie before turning to look towards the mouth of the cave. "I don't think we have to worry about them. I doubt they'll come down here."

"Why's that?"

"Well, a metal body doesn't allow for a very large range of motion so they try to avoid really uneven ground," he explained offhandedly as he dug around in his pocket in search of his glasses. "They're fine on flat surfaces and they can even go up and down stairs but if one of them fell over they'd never get back up without some help…a lot like the tin man from the Wizard of Oz."

"Doesn't make much sense to build a killer robot army that can't get up on their own," Jackie wondered turning away from the mouth of the cave, obviously put at ease by the Doctor's explanation. As she turned, the light from her torch spread out across the walls as she scanned them. "Doctor…"

"This is limestone, Jackie," he began to explain excitedly as he stared at the rough stone wall in front of him. "The cave is made of limestone and natural iron. The salt is coming out of the limestone and this place is plenty damp enough, water is a great conductor…"

"Doctor…." she tried again, all thoughts of the Cybermen or what type of stone was around them wiped from her mind as she looked around the cave.

"I'm sure this cave is giving off its own electromagnetic field. Based on the size of it, and if I were a betting man, I'd say it's a big one," he continued on, oblivious to Jackie's gaping next to him.

"Doctor…" she tried again, still staring at the cave behind him.

The Doctor scanned the stone wall in front of him as though any second now it would just tell him the answer to whatever question he was asking himself. "But no…wait….yes!" he glanced back down at the small hunk of natural iron in his hand, his eagerness dying almost immediately. "No… Limestone, natural iron, salt, water… It's not enough. It doesn't make sense."

"Doctor!"

Groaning to himself, he angrily spun around towards Jackie. Didn't she know he was trying to figure out what was going on so he could save Rose…and also the town. "What, Jackie?"

"Look at it," She said, not bothering to turn towards him, "the whole cave it's…it's sparkling."

"What?" he pulled what anyone would have deemed a ridiculously confused face had they been looking at him, which they hadn't so it really didn't matter, before he turned his whole upper body so he could see where the light from Jackie's torch was hitting the walls of the cave. "Oh. OH! Of course, Quartz!" he shouted in joy as he jumped up from where he was crouched next to the wall. "Oh, Jackie, you're brilliant!" he bounded over to the wall that Jackie had her light fixed on and moved so his nose was only centimeters from it.

"Oy, you're not gonna go lickin' that one too, are you?"

He eagerly spun around to face her. "Jackie, do you know what natural iron, limestone, salt, water and quartz make?"

"A big cave?"

"A battery!" he exclaimed triumphantly, punctuating the statement with a jab of his finger in her direction. "A giant, natural, battery. The water reacts with the limestone and the natural iron making a salt that creates an electromagnetic field and the quartz acts like a storage device."

"What could a battery like this run?" she asked hesitantly.

"Oh, no way to tell really, but it could run almost anything. And with a battery this size, it could be a lot of anythings," he said thoughtfully, again turning to look at the walls of the cave around him. "…or…just one thing…." he began muttering to himself, or at least she assumed it was to himself, he certainly wasn't looking at her as he prattled on. "One big thing. No, unless…Yes!" he yelled out, turning away from the wall again. "Oh, Jackie, you're brilliant."

"So you keep sayin'."

"Do you remember when we first got here and I said the town was giving off a strange energy field?" he continued on ignoring her comment. "I was wrong. Well…I say wrong, more like I wasn't completely correct. The town wasn't giving off a strange field at all. It's the caves underneath the town. That explains the dead birds and the mobiles not working. This giant, natural, battery is just sitting here under the town throwing off the magnetic field and making everything go wonky."

"Wonky?"

"Technical term," he answered her as he continued to look around the cave. "Whoever's bringing fairytales to life is using these caves to do it. Whatever technology they've built, or stolen…this is their power source."

"Can you cut it off?"

The Doctor grimaced and rubbed a hand along the back of his neck. "Bit hard to cut off a natural power source, especially one this big," He told her. "No, we'll have to go to the source to turn it off."

"How are we going to find that? Oh! Can you do some sort of scan for alien tech?"

The Doctor gave Jackie a puzzled look. "What is it with you Tyler women and scanning for alien tech? But to answer your question, no, I can't. The sonic wouldn't be able to pick up on anything from in here, which isn't to say that it would be able to lock onto anything if we left the cave. With an electromagnetic field as strong as what this place is giving off, it might have trouble locking onto a signal. Unless I know what to look for exactly, it's not going to be much help."

"So how are we going to find it then?"

"We do it the old fashioned way," he said with a self-satisfied grin as the continued into the cave. "We ask someone," he always did prefer the old fashioned way of information gathering anyhow.

Jackie followed after the Doctor who strode further into the cave as though he'd been there a hundred times before and knew the way by heart. The longer they walked, the more Jackie realized how perfect the cave system was as a hiding spot. She followed closely behind the Doctor as he made what seemed to be random choices of left or right when they reached any forks in the cave system. In the back of her mind, Jackie wondered if they would ever make it back out of the caves, let alone find anyone in them.

After a long silence, something Jackie never could really stand for too long, she sighed loudly. "How do you even know where you're going?"

"I've done this sort of thing before. It becomes instinct after a while really," he answered her giving the side of his nose a tap as he did so. "Right now my instinct says to go that way so that's the way we're going."

"Aren't you always getting lost?" she accused him as he continued to walk.

"Who told you that? Did Mickey tell you that?" he questioned angrily. It sounded like the type of thing ole Mickey boy would have said about him.

"He might have mentioned something along the lines of 'he never lands where he means to'," she said in a mockingly thoughtful voice, as though she had to really think about it to recall what Mickey had said when in fact she knew exactly what he had said.

"Well, that's rubbish!" the Doctor frowned into the dark of the cave. What did Mickey know about traveling in the time vortex with an older ship that happened to have a mind of her own? Most of the time it was the TARDIS' fault he ended up somewhere other than where he was aiming, granted it was usually because she knew he'd have more to do wherever she landed him but still.

"I have an excellent sense of direction," he added aloud in protest. "Far better than any human's I'll tell you that much. Oh," his frown grew even deeper for a moment, "suppose I'm I sort of one of those now, aren't I?" he posed to the silent cave and maybe Jackie, though it was mostly for the cave. "Still though, I have a much better sense of direction than most…especially Mickey Smith."

Jackie sighed quietly to herself. "I'm gonna miss him," she murmured sadly. "He lived with us you know? In the mansion along with his Gran. He was good to have around."

The Doctor stayed silent, letting the comment linger in the air around them. Of course having Mickey around was good. He had always been good as a last resort in saving the world and he had always been a good friend to Rose. All things considered he was really more than a good friend.

Putting aside all petty, knee jerk, jealous conclusions he might have had that day on the beach aside (Rose was obviously distraught and he couldn't help it if the first thing he thought after hearing the world 'baby' was that Mickey took comforting her a step too far) Mickey had put up with more than most men would have in his situation. He would always be grateful that Mickey was there for Rose when he couldn't be.

"I still can't believe you're here," Jackie said softly snapping the Doctor out of his thoughts. "After all this time and how hard she's worked to get back to you… Soon as that dimension cannon of hers was working she was off, and she had all of reality to look through to get back to you. The blokes at Torchwood said it would be impossible to find the exact right place and time, and that she was completely mental to think she could pull it off. Didn't matter that she had just proved them all wrong about being able to travel to parallel worlds in the first place."

The corner of the Doctor's mouth twitched briefly. That was Rose, stubborn, utterly brilliant when she needed to be and she absolutely had no idea what the word impossible meant.

"You know part of me thought I'd never see her again. 'S why I went along with Mickey through the dimension cannon, last chance to say goodbye," Jackie said in a light tone that betrayed how hard it was for her to admit how she very well could have lost her daughter forever.

"Jackie, I'm sor-"

"Quiet you," She said harshly cutting him off. "You can't be sorry for everything you know, especially when it didn't even happen," she told him with a stern look.

He looked forward again, his hands sliding into his pockets as his head bowed down slightly. She had seen him walk like that before and there were only two things it could be. It was either because he didn't agree with something someone else, well usually just Rose, had said but was going along with to humor her, or he was sulking quietly to himself. The last thing she wanted was for him to start brooding while they were out searching for a bunch of townsfolk in a dangerous cave with monsters and Cybermen about.

"I'm glad it all worked out," she started again. "And, for what it's worth, I'm sorry you had to leave-"

"Oh, I'll be fine," he cut in, not entirely sure he wanted to know how that sentence was going to end.

"Yeah, you're always fine," Jackie said in an entirely unconvinced tone. "Still, it'll be an adjustment, wont it? Not being able to swan off to the end of the universe."

"I've already been to the end of the universe…not a trip I'd want to repeat," he told her in all seriousness. "Besides, I was stuck on Earth before with no TARDIS, weeell a very broken TARDIS at any rate," he explained a little happy for the distraction small talk brought. "I worked for UNIT," he continued with a tiny grin to himself, "lovely people…well, mostly," he amended as his grin turned rather quickly into a small frown.

Jackie gave him a long look as he continued walking next to her. "When were you stuck on Earth?"

"Oh, long time ago now," he told her. His love for going on and on did little to entice him to share the rest of that particular story however. "Suppose I could work for them again," he continued, though mostly to himself. "Or Torchwood…well maybe not Torchwood. Though, I could work with Rose. Maybe we could just freelance or act as-"

"Thank you," Jackie blurted out quickly.

The Doctor stopped talking immediately. It wasn't everyday Jacqueline Tyler thanked him, and he didn't even know what he did to deserve it. "For what?" he asked blankly.

"For giving her back to me."

"Jackie, I didn't…"

"Yeah, but you're him and he did, and you would have," she told him seriously, "so thank you."

"You're welcome, Jackie," he said with a touched smile.

Jackie opened her mouth as though she were going to add something but quickly snapped it shut before she slapped the Doctor's shoulder roughly.

"Oy, what was that for?" he asked as he stared at her, they had just started to get along and she had to go and smack him.

Jackie raised her eyebrows at him and nodded just behind him. He turned to look in the direction she had been gesturing. In the dim light cast by the torch Jackie held, two shadows began to move.

A pair of youngish men, both in their mid twenties at the most, stood on either side of the cave with hunting rifles trained on the Doctor and Jackie.

"See, I told you this was the right way," the Doctor declared smugly. "Take that Mickey Smith!"

~TBC (Friday morning, I promise)


	14. Chapter 14

Title: Into the Woods (interlude/21)  
Pairing: TenII/Rose  
Rating: PG  
Genre: Action/adventure, romance, drama (just a smidge)  
Spoilers: Just to be safe let's say everything up to JE.  
Disclaimer: I don't own them and I make no money off of them (if anything it's the other way around)  
Summary: After being left on the beach the Doctor, Rose and Jackie are forced to stay overnight in a small Norway village until they can get home, but something strange is happening in the quiet town.  
Authors Note: Here's a short interlude.

Thank you to my amazing beta **mik109** you rock.

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Finn wondered, and not for the first time that night, how he had ended up here. Not in the cave's, he knew that part, but here as in the state his life was currently in.

He had lived his whole life in that small and exceedingly dull little town not too far from the beach. His job prospects were to work on cargo ships or to work on fishing ships, maybe if he was very, very lucky, he could've worked on one of the big ships that carried the fish to other places.

As much as he enjoyed nautical escapades, which was equal to how much he enjoyed fish to tell the truth, he never quite fancied himself as someone who worked on a ship. So he had done everything he could to ensure that he wouldn't have to. He had learned everything he could while in school, and saved every last cent he had ever made, so he could leave.

The Universe, it would seem, had had other plans for him. First there was the Cybermen invasion then the Darkness. It seemed every time he had been about to head out something else horrible would pop up and stop him. Heck, this time it didn't even wait for him to be about to leave. It just popped up straight away.

He had been woken up in the middle of the night by the sound of something smashing a door shut and a ridiculous amount of wind slamming into his house. That's when he'd noticed it was no longer the middle of the night but rather it was the middle of the day. It wasn't until he had gotten downstairs and found a trio of pigs crouched under his kitchen table that he had begun to think he might not actually be awake.

"Don't go outside!" one of the small pigs had shouted at him with a distinctive snort. "The wolf will get you!"

"What?" he had asked, bewildered as he walked to his front door. He'd quickly undid the latch and swung it open just wide enough to see a hulking wolf standing on his hind legs just outside, gulping in a massive breath before he began to blow it out again. "Right!" Finn had shouted as he'd slammed the door shut once again and firmly bolted the lock into place.

It had taken him a whole seven minutes to change out of his sleepwear and into some real clothing before he snuck out his back door and began to head towards the caves. He had even joined up with a few of his neighbors along the way.

Finn sighed at the memory of what had happened only hours before even though it already felt like it had been days since. That's what boredom did to a person's mind. The uninteresting parts seemed to stretch out and the times when things were actually happening seemed to speed up he mused as he shifted uneasily.

He leaned heavily against the cold stone wall of the cave behind him and let his head roll to the side so he could look towards where most of the town was held up. Everyone who had made it from the town to the caves was silhouetted against the warm light of the small generator powered lights they had placed around the largish sized cavern they used as their hiding spot. Their bodies seemed to move like black blobs in a vertical lava lamp at this distance.

"It occurs to me that there is a fault in our strategy here," he groaned quietly as he shifted the heavy rifle he had been handed as soon as he had made it into the cavern.

"What?" Geir, the other man forced to play watchdog, muttered halfheartedly. His voice was lazy with what Finn assumed was a stifled yawn.

"Well, think about it. If we're all in here, how are we going to know when everything out there is gone? I mean, when do we know its okay to come out again?"

Finn could barely make out the shadowy shape of Geir nodding as he seemed to mull the question over for a long moment. "Well, same way as last time, I guess."

"Which was how?" Finn asked eagerly. "Wait until someone gets fed up with how bad it smells down here so they go running back out and happen to discover that everything is fine?"

Geir sighed angrily as he readjusted the strap of his rifle. "I don't know." He grumbled unhelpfully. This was shaping up to be one hell of a day and, if his slowly forming headache was any indicator, it was only going to get worse.

Geir had been about to say something else when the sound of quiet murmuring caused him to snap his mouth shut. Both he and Finn slowly raised their guns as they peered into the inky blackness of the cave before them, the light from the generators completely cut off by the bend in the tunnel.

Finn slowly moved forward, a flash of light catching his eye in the pitch black. It sounded like two voices in the dark, one male and one female though he couldn't make out what they were saying.

He squared his shoulders and nodded for Geir to follow him farther into the tunnel and away from the main cavern. Together, they slowly made their way towards the voices and the fluttering light.

As they rounded a particularly large rock in the tunnel way, the owners of those voices came into view. A short blonde woman stood in the cave, a torch held firmly in her hands, looking up towards a rather tall and very skinny brown haired man. Just as Finn finished rounding the rock, the woman reached out and slapped the man's shoulder roughly.

He shouted something at her before turning towards where he and Geir were standing with both of their guns aimed at the newcomers' chests.

"See, I told you this was the right way." The man stated in smug tone. "Take that Mickey Smith."

~TBC


	15. Chapter 15

Title: Into the Woods (14/21)  
Pairing: TenII/Rose  
Rating: PG  
Genre: Action/adventure, romance, drama (just a smidge)  
Spoilers: Just to be safe let's say everything up to JE.  
Disclaimer: I don't own them and I make no money off of them (if anything it's the other way around)  
Summary: After being left on the beach the Doctor, Rose and Jackie are forced to stay overnight in a small Norway village until they can get home, but something strange is happening in the quiet town.  
Authors Note: We're finally getting some answers as to what the heck is going on.

Thank you to my amazing beta **mik109** you rock.

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"Who do think they're supposed to be then?" one of the men asked as he lowered his gun just enough to aim the barrel of it at the Doctor's chest instead of his head.

"I dunno, Jack Sprat maybe?" the other answered with a quirk of his eyebrow.

"Oy! I'm not ithat/i skinny." the Doctor complained loudly. However, he had to admit he was glad they had picked something obscure enough for Jackie to miss the fact that they had implied they were married, which honestly made him feel slightly queasy, and that she was fat.

"Now, I'm the Doctor," he said a bit warily as he slowly lowered his hands, "and I'd rather you point that somewhere else." He finished, nodding towards the gun still pointed at him.

"The Doctor? What kind of Doctor? Doctor who?" the man who had previously been pointing a rifle at his chest asked in puzzlement. "Where are you from and how did you find us?"

"Just the Doctor," he began to explain, the corner of his mouth twitching for a split second. All new universe, same old question, it was actually a little relieving to hear it. "And we're here to help," he said as the other man lowered his gun away from Jackie.

"In town, we found a woman she told us about the caves."

"What woman?" barked the shorter dark haired man, his knuckles turning white as he gripped his gun tightly.

"Freya. Her name was Freya," Jackie cut in, eyeing the man nervously.

"Freya?" the other, taller and blonder, man asked anxiously. "She's my neighbor. I brought her son down here with me. Is she alright?"

"Fine. At least when we saw her, she was fine," The Doctor answered, a look of relief washing across the young man's face at his words.

"Still…" the other man said wearily as he eyed the Doctor suspiciously. "That doesn't explain how you found ius/i."

"Oh, that," the Doctor said as he turned to the other man. "Well," he began with a sniff, "some of us just have an incredibly good sense of direction."

Next to him, Jackie made a strange croaking sound that was something between a gag and a snort.

Before the shorter, and frankly angrier, man could say anything else, the other one cut him off. "How are you going to help us?"

"Finn!" the man barked angrily turning towards his friend as he glared at him. "We don't know these people. For all we know, they're the reason all of this is happening," he suggested in a low murmur.

"What do you want to do then, Geir? Send them back outside?" Finn asked incredulously.

"You can't send us back out there!" Jackie squawked at the two men getting both of their attention. "There are Cybermen-"

"What?" "Cybermen where?" the two men began to talk over one another, cutting off Jackie's sentence.

"Didn't you come down here because of them?" the Doctor asked.

The taller man shook his head, dread in his eyes. "I was running away from a wolf."

"Was it wearin' a really ugly dressing gown?" Jackie asked enthusiastically. If this bloke had been chased down into the caves by that wolf that had chased her about the motel, it'd shut the Doctor up right quick about the whole thing.

The man looked at Jackie his brow furrowed in thought. "No…he was trying to blow my house down."

"Different wolf then," the Doctor said with mock sympathy as he patted Jackie's shoulder lightly. "Still, if you lot were chased down here by just fairytales then you must have been down here for a while now," the Doctor continued as he looked back to the two men in front of them. "Tell me, Finn was it?" he asked the taller man, who nodded in affirmation to him. "Where are the rest of the people from town?"

"Why do you need to know?" Geir asked in frustration even though the Doctor never looked his way.

"This way," Finn said as he slung the rifle over his shoulder and started to lead the Doctor and Jackie around the bend back to where everyone else was, not bothering to pay any attention to Geir as he did so. If there really were Cybermen up there now and this Doctor could do anything to help, they'd be foolish not to take him up on the offer.

Finn rounded the corner of the tunnel which gave way to the large cavern where the rest of the townspeople were huddled together, the two strangers a few steps behind him and Geir glaringly taking up the rear.

The Doctor's eyebrows raised in impression as he inspected the large cavern they had just entered. Maybe it wasn't such a bad hiding spot after all. There were several petrol powered generators hooked up to an array of flood lighting and small portable stovetops. Cots lined the walls of the cavern closest to the entrance while sleeping bags littered the floor.

He could only catch fleeting questions here and there as the townspeople slowly began to take notice of them. 'Who are they?' 'How did they find us?' and, most often 'Do they have anything to do with what's going on?' came at them from all sides as the people began to talk animatedly amongst themselves, fear and confusion laced through their voices.

"There anyone you need in particular?" Finn asked as the Doctor continued to look around the cavern.

"Not as such," the Doctor said as every face was fixed on him and Jackie. He took a deep breath and blew it out slowly. "Well, here goes everything then," he muttered before clearing his throat noisily in an attempt to quiet everyone. It didn't work.

The Doctor huffed out an angry breath. Well, now was as good a time as any to get in touch with his inner Donna. "OY SHUT YOUR YAPS!" he shouted loudly over the noisy crowd instantly earning him the quiet he had been aiming for. "That's more like it," he muttered as Jackie stared at him a bit taken aback by the outburst and he decided that Donna would have indeed been very proud of that.

"Now, I'm the Doctor!" he continued to speak loudly. "Bit new in town. However, I couldn't help but notice you seem to be in a spot of trouble. I know you're all confused and scared, but I'm here to help. And to do that, I need answers," he told them in his best 'I am a Time Lord and you're going to do what I say' voice.

"How do we know we can trust you?" a sole voice hollered out to several shouts of agreement.

Every face turned towards him as the few shouts were joined by quiet, distrustful murmurings from everyone else.

The Doctor nodded angrily. "You don't have to trust me," he shouted, cutting through the angry clatter from the town. "You can just wait for the next person to come along and offer to save you. After all, people with my particular skill set come by small Norwegian towns…oh what, every few millennia?" he asked flippantly.

"How long are you willing to wait?" he barked dangerously, his eyes dark and brewing with the same terrifying timelessness that Jackie had seen in the tunnel earlier. "Because things are just going to get worse from here."

"It starts out with a few children's bedtime stories, then there are more and more and they get worse each time. Now, there are Cybermen out there. Killing your neighbors and your friends and it's just a matter of time until they find you out here," he finished forebodingly.

At the mention of Cybermen, the crowd broke out into panicked chatter. Finn tightened a fist around the strap of his rifle as his eyes flickered over the throng of people.

"Listen to me, and this is important!" the Doctor continued loudly. "Has anything happened? Has anyone done anything that could cause this?" he asked, his voice hard and insistent. "Has anything…fallen out of the sky or suddenly appeared, or disappeared. Has anyone been building anything or moving things?"

Quiet murmurings spread throughout the cavern, the people all turning to one another and speaking. The sounds of their voices echoed and reverberated around the cavern, not one voice discernable from another in the din of noise they created together.

The Doctor groaned to himself. It was never easy with a large group. "I need an answer!" he demanded. His protests went unanswered.

A shrill whistle pierced the cacophony of sound causing everyone to quiet immediately. The Doctor turned to Jackie with soundless admiration. "Back on the Estate, we used to take turns lookin' after all the kids when they'd go outside to play." She said by way of explanation.

The Doctor gave Jackie an impressed grin before beginning with the townspeople again. "Now, I need an answer. And I only need one of you to answer me!"

"Maren," Finn said hesitantly.

"What about her?" a heavy set man asked the younger man in a condescending voice.

"The cave-" Finn tried to continue but was cut off by a loud snort.

The Doctor turned to look at Finn as most of the town began to murmur with one another again.

"Don't be silly that's nothing new," the same heavy set man barked at him.

"What cave?" the Doctor asked Finn calmly, a startling change from how he had been just moments earlier.

Finn hesitated for a moment as his eyes darted around the faces in the cave. "It's…." he sighed and turned to look the Doctor straight on. "My neighbor's daughter was playing in the woods. I don't know what happened but when her brother found her she wasn't well."

"Not well?" Jackie prodded.

Finn nodded to her. "She was unconscious. No one knows what happened, or how to wake her up. Maybe that has something to do with what's going on."

"If whatever hurt her was in the caves, then why are you hiding here?" the Doctor cut in softly.

"No," the heavy set man butted in once again shaking his head fervently. "Not the caves, Ithe/I cave. It's Idifferent/I than these caves."

"Different? Different how?"

"It's not very big for one. And it's the only one that doesn't join with the rest of the caves. Plus, it's not made out of the same rocks these are," Finn said waving his hand around the cavern in explanation. "And…"

The Doctor quirked an eyebrow at the younger man as he let his sentence trail off again. "And what?"

Finn shook his head solemnly. "There are stories…old stories," he muttered with a roll of his eyes, "about it being haunted. Just kid stuff you know?" he asked nervously. "It used to be filled with lots of these weird bits and pieces, historical artifacts and the like. All of it's been moved into the museum at town hall for years, since before I was even born, but no one really knows what else could be out there."

The Doctor nodded. "Jackie, stay here and keep everyone calm," he commanded turning towards her. "As long as you don't leave, you should all be safe as a pig built brick house," he said with a lopsided grin at his own joke. "At least long enough until I can do something possibly dangerous and utterly brilliant to save the day."

Jackie shook her head slowly. "Don't be daft. I'm not leaving you alone."

"It'll be dangerous."

"When isn't it when you're around?" she wondered good-naturedly.

He flashed a small smile her way. Rose most certainly got her sense of adventure from her mother, not that he would ever share that information with Jackie on the off chance that she'd take it to mean he actually liked her instead of simply tolerate her, which was definitely what he did.

"Now, Finn, my boy," he inquired over his shoulder to where the younger man stood, "where can I find this cave?"

------------------------------------------

"Now, he said it was that way," the Doctor pointed through the trees.

"Yes, but so are the Cybermen," Jackie pointed out as she stepped up next to the Doctor's side, squaring her shoulders resolutely.

"I had planned on avoiding them," the Doctor explained casually as he began to pick his way through the trees in the direction Finn had pointed them in.

"You have a plan?" Jackie asked in amazement, making sure to keep her voice down in case there was anything dangerous nearby to overhear, and then shoot them.

"I always have a plan," he answered, shooting a hurt look back at Jackie, who in turn simply raised her eyebrows in all the explanation she needed. "Well…usually at least," he amended bitterly.

"They ever work?"

"Most of the time," the Doctor said with a small nod. "Not always though," he finished, his nod turning into a shake of his head. "Doesn't matter at any rate."

"Why's that then?"

"Because, Jackie, I'm rather good at thinking on my feet. That, and I know that cave is going to answer all of my questions."

"How do you know that?"

"I know because the electromagnetic field this town is giving off was stronger the further out of town we got up until we entered this forest. It was dying down again by the time we found those caves," he explained. "And guess what's right on the edge of the town?"

"Oh, the cave!"

"The cave!" he agreed with a rakish smile.

"So the cave is makin' the fairytales come alive," she said eagerly.

"Yes!" he exclaimed excitedly before he fully registered what she had said, his face fell quickly. "No! No, Jackie, a cave can't do anything other than well…be cave like…no, whatever is iin/i that cave is doing it," he told her. "And whatever it is, I'm going to stop it, one way or another," he added darkly.

They walked together silently for a while, the Doctor brooding and Jackie slowly becoming more and more bored as they continued on. No sign of Cybermen, or anything else for that matter, for a good long while now.

"You know that 'amazing sense of direction' of yours?" Jackie asked suddenly, breaking the quiet that had risen around them. "You sure it's workin' right now?"

"Yes, Jackie."

"'Cause Finn said it wouldn't take long for us to get to this bleedin' cave, and it's been almost 30 minutes," she complained quietly, completely ignoring his comment. The longer they walked in the direction they had been pointed in, the closer they got to the town and even if they were lost, she'd rather not chance being overheard by anything that could 'delete' them with little to no trouble at all.

"It's called being cautious. We walk slowly, and iquietly/i until we get to the cave," he complained and answered her at the same time.

"We should be close though right?" she whispered, this time without the edge of annoyance in her voice. "How can we tell if we're close?"

Any answer the Doctor would have given was cut off by a loud 'Baaa' coming from just ahead of them. His eyebrows shot up and Jackie's eyes grew wide as a group of four tail-less sheep trotted by, all of them bleating noisily.

Jackie looked back to the Doctor. "Never mind, we're close," she said uneasily as the sheep passed them effortlessly.

The Doctor nodded, which slowly turned into a bewildered shake of his head, as he began to move onward.

The forest started to thin out as the pair continued on. The mostly even ground began to give way to rougher terrain. Rocks began to dot the floor of the forest, the trees slowly changing from the healthy autumn colored things that made up the forest to dark, scraggly things, dried up and long dead. Heavy tree roots jutted out of the dry dirt around them as though the trees themselves had tried to up and leave to get away from the more sinister air of the wood around them.

With each rustle of the wind the spindly branches of the trees around them clacked and scratched together, the fluttering of leaves long gone. The crunch of dried up twigs and rocks shifting and rubbing together under their weight seemed to echo in the space around them, causing Jackie to flinch with each particularly loud snap of wood and grind of stone.

Sunlight filtered through sparse trees as the pair slowed, edging their way forward. They stopped simultaneously as the view shifted away from the woods.

The earth looked as though it had been ripped violently open, the dark brown of the dirt slowly giving way to rough black stone as the cave rose out of the ground. The mouth of the cave was like a jagged scar in the rock, wide and yawning.

The air was thick and hot just in front of its opening, the stale smell of old air and dirt far different from the dank metal tang of the caverns they had just left or the gritty dust filled air of the tunnel under town hall.

"So, this is the cave, is it?" Jackie asked meekly as she tried to peer inside its jet black recesses. "Not so bad."

"This isn't a cave, Jackie…" the Doctor stated gravely as he stared open mouthed at the gaping hole in the rock, "It's a spaceship."

~TBC


	16. Chapter 16

Title: Into the Woods (15/21)  
Pairing: TenII/Rose  
Rating: PG  
Genre: Action/adventure, romance, drama (just a smidge)  
Spoilers: Just to be safe let's say everything up to JE.  
Disclaimer: I don't own them and I make no money off of them (if anything it's the other way around)  
Summary: After being left on the beach the Doctor, Rose and Jackie are forced to stay overnight in a small Norway village until they can get home, but something strange is happening in the quiet town.  
Authors Note: Here it is, the chapter in which everything makes sense. Huzzah we made it.

Thank you to my amazing beta lj user="mik109" thanks for all of your help.

------------------------------------------

"A spaceship?" Jackie asked incredulously.

"Yup," the Doctor answered, popping the p, as he bounded up to the gaping hole in the hull of the crashed craft.

"You can just glance at the outside of it and just know it's a spaceship?"

He nodded at her question as he put his glasses on with a flourish. "I can indeed."

"It's made out of rock, Doctor," she pointed out as though that was proof enough this was most definitely not a spaceship.

"So was the Sycorax's ship," he reminded her indignantly as he sent her a confused look over the rim of his glasses. "You remember them. Don't you?" he asked her as he turned back around to peer closely at the wall of the craft. "They used great big hunks of asteroid to create their spaceships. This is different though."

He took a deep breath as he gave the outside of the ship one last look over before he strolled inside. "It's a synthetic material. Bioengineered rock," he explained, over enunciating the words for dramatic effect, as he studied the walls inside the ship, "harder than any metal you have here on Earth…or will have for at least another, oh, four or five centuries."

"So…" Jackie began as she took a few tentative steps into the ship. "Does that mean it's from the future?"

"What?" the Doctor asked turning towards her before shaking his head firmly. "Oh, no. Not at all. It's just not from around here," he told her with a small grin. It was a good thought, a ship from the future crash landing and causing trouble, and it wouldn't have been the first time, either.

"This ship has been here for a long time now, long before they built this town," he said as he continued to walk into the ship. "It's just been sitting here for hundreds of years, thousands even. Oh, you've been lost for a very long time. Haven't you?" the Doctor asked the ship as he ran his hand across its smooth, stony surface.

Jackie fumbled with the torch she had been toting along since he'd handed it over in the tunnel. She flicked the switch on and cast the beam of light towards the Doctor who flinched as he turned back to look at her. "Sorry," She mumbled quietly as she moved the light out of his face and into the ship.

The Doctor turned away from the great big hole in the ship's hull and studied the wreckage inside. Whoever had taken all of the "historic artifacts", as Finn called them, out of it must have picked up every last piece of unbroken equipment inside. There was surprisingly little littering the floor of the ship, including any indication of it ever having acted as a home to any animals.

Jackie tried to make sure she kept the light of her torch pointed in front of the Doctor so he could see everything around him well enough. Unfortunately, this bit of assistance made it more difficult for her to find her way. She tripped over a stray rock, or maybe it was a piece of the ship, she couldn't really be sure anymore. With a startled yelp, she dropped the torch so she could grab a hold of what looked like a stone beam near the wall of the ship.

The Doctor glanced back towards her to make sure she was all right. Knowing Jackie, she would say something snarky about how even an "amazing" Time Lord can trip in the dark, or possibly just slap him because it was somehow his fault. Either way, he was better off not giving her a chance to choose so pretending it never happened suited him just fine.

The torch gently rocked back and forth on the ground in front of Jackie as she righted herself. The light from it bounced around the stony walls of the dark room, the edge of the beam just barely catching something in the room ahead of the pair. It glinted in the darkness instantly catching the Doctor's eye. Whatever it was wasn't the same matte gray as the rest of the ship. It didn't even seem to be stone for that matter.

The Doctor titled his head to the side to try and make out the shape of the object in the gloomy darkness as Jackie plucked the torch off the ground.

"Jackie!" he barked, making her jump before he hurried towards whatever it was in the next room, bounding across the cavernous space around a sharp corner and out of Jackie's sight.

Jackie straightened up and pointed the torch in the direction the Doctor had taken off in before quickly following after him. She rounded the corner and crashed into his still form. "What are you doing shouting my name and running off like that?" she asked shrilly as she pushed away from him.

The Doctor pointedly ignored her as he stared around this new wide room, straightening his glasses after the sudden impact. His eyes darted between a protruding section of the wall and three cigar shaped objects in the middle of the room. Each of the shapes was easily two and a half meters long and less than a third of that wide. Each came up to his waist and they were each several paces away from the next. They were pale gray, a lighter and softer color than the slate of the walls and floor of the ship, and they glimmered in the light of the torch.

He moved forward, his hand skimming across the flat surface of the section of wall that jutted out sharply from the wall. As his hand glided across its surface, a series of lights flashed on, bathing the Doctor in a dim orange glow.

"It's a control panel," he answered Jackie's quiet gasp as he inspected the various readings and instructions that popped up before him. He raised an eyebrow at the stony monitor as he punched different keys and scrolled through information. "The recent rift activity somehow rebooted the ships systems. Oh, what did I tell you? Giant, natural battery!" he exclaimed. "The reboot bypassed the main power generators and hooked the ship directly into the cave system," he explained, a lazy grin pointed at the screen.

He continued to flip through the different screens popping up at a breakneck speed on the screen in front of him. "Looks like caves aren't quite strong enough for the ship. All of the systems are on but only a few of them are working at any given time."

"So 's that give you any idea what's going on then?" Jackie asked impatiently as she came up beside the Doctor.

He turned to look at her, his mouth clamping shut quickly to keep himself from telling her any of the different systems that were currently fluctuating the most. He quickly turned back to the computer and began punching in different commands.

"You weren't even checking were you?" she asked accusingly.

"Of course, I was," he answered her quietly, refusing to look away from the computer.

"Oh!" she gave out a mirthless bark of laughter. "That's just great! Put a big alien ship in front of you and you stop caring about saving anyone."

The Doctor grimaced at her comment but continued to work. "It's a Tusharen cruiser. It's not a small one, either," he mentioned as he continued to fiddle with the computer. "The rest of it must be buried from the crash, or possibly just strewn about the forest in bits and pieces."

"And these Tusha-whatever's-"

"Tusharen."

"Yeah…they're makin' the fairytales come alive, then?"

"No," The Doctor frowned and shook his head slowly. "It doesn't make sense," he said running a hand through his hair in frustration. "The Tusharen's never did anything involving replicated matter or shaped force fields and holographic images," he sighed quietly and continued to work with the computer.

Jackie turned away from the strangely flickering computer screen when it began to cause her head to ache. She looked around the large room they were standing in, slowly moving her torch across it. Her eyes eventually landed on the three objects spread out on the other side of the room. She tilted her head as she studied the nearest one.

It looked cold and uninviting, and the longer she stared at it the more uneasy she felt. It reminded her of a coffin, a long skinny one sure, but it was still a coffin. Along the base of the thing were more of the flickering lights and a small monitor like the one the Doctor was using.

"What're those, then?" she asked as she continued to eye the objects uneasily. "Some kind of alien sofa or something?"

The Doctor glanced towards her before looking over his shoulder to where she was staring. "It's a stasis pod…" the Doctor trailed off as he continued to stare at the long gray pod just to the right of him. "Oh! Of course!" he shouted suddenly causing Jackie to jump in alarm. "It's a stasis pod! Oh, that's…that's very good," he said grinning madly as he rushed over to the pods side and knelt down next to it, hands immediately flying to the small computer there.

"Brilliant race the Tusharen," he began to prattle on as he punched different keys at, what seemed to Jackie at least, random. "Their planet was in orbit around a sun about to go supernova so they created thousands of satellites and probes and sent them out all over the universe to try and pinpoint another planet they could live on." He explained as the high pitch whine of the sonic screwdriver filled the quiet of the room.

The Doctor deftly pulled the stone panel of the computer away from the base of the pod before lying on his back so he could stick his head under it. "Eventually, they found another planet to inhabit, but it was billions of light years away and they knew their race would never survive a trip that long without stasis pods," his voice was muffled as he began to poke and prod around inside of the control panel.

"The thing about the Tusharens is a regular stasis pod would never work for them," he started to pull different wires out and run the sonic over them before quickly shoving them back in order to grab a new batch, "so they had to create all new ones that wouldn't just sustain their bodies but would also store their minds separately."

"Why?"

"They're a telepathic race, which means they're just too sensitive to use a regular stasis pod," he said with a small frown as he stared at the pair of wires he held in his hand, wiggling his hand next to his head in an attempt to illustrate their sensitivity to Jackie. "The way a regular stasis pod works is it monitors vital signs and keeps the mind in a state of perpetual hibernation which is all good and fine for most races, but when you have a great big brain like the Tusharen do, a computer can't monitor it well enough. Those great big brains of theirs would just shrivel up in one of those. So, they created a system which would let their thoughts be filtered and stored up into a virtual reality," he told her, looking away from the wires in his hand.

The Doctor froze, his eyebrows knitting together in deep thought, wires in hand and glasses perched on the end of his nose. "That's what this is…" he breathed out quietly, his eyes falling back to the wires in his hands. "That's what's happening, why the fairytales are coming alive, why that little girl can't be woken up. She must have turned on one of the pods, and with the electromagnetic field of the caves playing merry hob with all of the electronics of the ship…those caves are acting like a giant conductor for the pod."

"What's that mean?"

The Doctor's head snapped back towards Jackie. "It means the virtual reality isn't just affecting her. Its affecting the whole town. It's making everything her mind creates real for everyone else."

"Oh! Like that room on Star Trek?" Jackie asked hurriedly.

"Well…other than the fact that that's a fictional television series, the room you're talking about has nothing to do with being an imagined reality like this is and that room is based off of completely ridiculous science which would never ever work. Yes, a bit like that," he said quickly. "What is it with you humans and Star Trek anyway? You, Donna, Rose…you're always bringing it up," he complained quietly to himself.

"But why's it connected to her? What's so special about Ithat/I little girl? This ship has been here for hundreds of years, you said so yourself…she can't be the first person to have ever wandered in and poked about. So why her?" Jackie asked him anxiously.

"Oh, very good, Jackie," he said grinning madly at her. "Excellent point, but the ship didn't have any power before the rift activity rebooted it," he reminded her as he began to shove the wires he had pulled out back under the pod. "Old Torchwood is going to have its hands full for a while now I'm willing to bet, all kinds of alien technology getting an extra little boost of energy across all of reality," he added thoughtfully.

"Do you know what all of this means, Jackie?" he finally asked her excitedly.

"Haven't the slightest," she replied with a small grin at his obvious epiphany and boundless enthusiasm, all complaints about Star Trek aside.

"It means the pod isn't broken!" he shouted jumping up from the ground. "Well…not completely. It's not malfunctioning. It's locked onto little Maren's mind and it's put her body into stasis and her mind is creating a virtual reality to keep itself busy, which is exactly what the pod was made to do. The only thing is her virtual reality is less virtual and more reality reality. BUT!" he exclaimed as he bounded over to the computer at the side of the room again. "That's a good thing! Well, not entirely, but it does mean that I can fix it."

He began to punch at the controls again. "All I have to do is change the settings on the pod that locked onto that little girl to let her out now instead of however long it was set for," he stared at the screen as different symbols flashed across, his eyebrows slowly pushed together and his mouth turned downwards in an angry frown.

"No…" he muttered darkly at the computer screen his hands flying across the controls as he began to frantically punch in different commands. "No, no, no, no, NO! GAH!" he shouted at the screen as the lights of the controls blinked out entirely. Both of his hands flew up to tangle in his hair, angrily pulling on the ends of it as though that would somehow make what the screen said change.

"What? What happened?" Jackie asked hesitantly.

"All of the energy has been diverted into the virtual reality to keep it stable, the rest of ships systems are failing…"

"What's that mean?"

"I can't fix it."

"Of course, you can fix it," Jackie encouraged as she looked over his shoulder at the screen. All of the alien writing he had been reading earlier was gone, replaced with a short message that flickered in the dark. The screens warm golden orange glow now turned red, which admittedly was usually a bad sign.

"No, Jackie, this isn't me saying something is impossible and then conveniently proving myself wrong. I literally cannot access the stasis pod controls because the ship's systems have shut down. The pods are still working. Thankfully the caves seem to have enough power to keep them running fine, but I can't access their controls and if I can't access the stasis pod controls that means there's no way to wake that little girl up."

Five large symbols appeared on the screen now gently flashing in warning of something Jackie wasn't sure she wanted to know about. She shook her head and turned to stare at the Doctors worried face. "No, there's gotta be some way to turn it off."

"How, Jackie? I'm all open to ideas."

"Well, I don't know! Shoot it or hit it or something."

"You can't just destroy it."

"Why not? That'll turn if off wont it?

"That could kill Rose," he said angrily, and his voice was low and hard as the words left his mouth. "And it most certainly would kill that little girl. You can't just pull the plug on your computer and expect everything you had running on it to be there when you turn it back on. It doesn't work like that especially with someone's mind."

Jackie shook her head slowly as the flickering lights on the screen began to fade and blink out. "Then, what do we do?"

He stared at the rock screen in front of him as it flickered and turned off. The dim light from it now lost, the room again fell into darkness, save the torch Jackie still held. The Doctor wracked his mind, pouring over every last detail he could remember about Tusharen technology. Facts and figures flew through his mind as he tried to remember information he hadn't needed for hundreds of years. There had to be a way to fix this, a workaround or a reboot or a backdoor.

The Doctor froze as everything clicked into place. "A backdoor," he murmured quietly. "All virtual reality programs are built with a backdoor in the system! A way for the user who's hooked into the program to exit it," he said, turning towards Jackie. "If I can get to the little girl, I can guide her to the backdoor and the program will shut down properly," he explained as he began to quickly make his way out of the room and towards the opening in the ships battered hull.

"How're you going to do that?" Jackie asked as she followed closely after him.

"Tusharens are telepathic, and so are Time Lords."

Jackie continued to follow after him, shoving the now turned off torch into her coat pocket as they started making their way back through the woods and towards the town.

~TBC on Monday


	17. Chapter 17

Title: Into the Woods (16/21)  
Pairing: TenII/Rose  
Rating: PG  
Genre: Action/adventure, romance, drama (just a smidge)  
Spoilers: Just to be safe let's say everything up to JE.  
Disclaimer: I don't own them and I make no money off of them (if anything it's the other way around)  
Summary: After being left on the beach the Doctor, Rose and Jackie are forced to stay overnight in a small Norway village until they can get home, but something strange is happening in the quiet town.  
Authors Note: Again, I have very little to say. It's an incredibly strange experience for me.

Thank you to my amazing beta lj user="mik109" I miss you.

------------------------------------------

The pair picked their way through the edge of the tree line. They moved quickly and quietly back towards the other side of town.

Freya's house, if his memory served him (and when didn't it?) was only four blocks in from the town hall, which happened to be four blocks in from the edge of town. If they were fast enough, and quiet enough, they would be able to slip past any patrolling Cybermen and into town without any trouble. Then, it would just be a matter of guiding the little girls mind to safety and everything would go back to the way it was before Jackie had barged into Rose's room earlier that evening ranting about a huge hairy beast attacking her.

Together the Doctor and Jackie dashed across the empty expanse between the woods and the town, ducking in next to the nearest house. They edged their way around it, the Doctor in front and Jackie just behind him in much the same way as they had been when they had made their escape earlier.

They continued like this, crossing another road and warily picking their way between homes, with no incident. They easily passed the road that would have taken them to town hall, which was now completely transformed into an imposing castle. No Cybermen in sight. The Doctor realized that fact should have reassured him, but it didn't.

They continued on, quick and quiet, passing several more streets before the sound started. The Doctor stiffened as a heavy thumping sound began to grow in the quiet of the deserted town. He pushed Jackie none too gently into the side of the home they were hidden next too, pancaking his body up against the wall next to her. The sound of heavy metal feet pounding into the ground filled the narrow street and the pair waited with baited breath. The Doctor shifted just enough to see around the corner of the building, his eyes fixed on the road they had just been walking down.

Jackie's eyes grew wide as seven Cybermen, two abreast with one brining up the rear, came marching into view. "Do you think that's all of them?"

"I don't know."

"Where are they all going?" she asked as she peeked around the corner of the house alongside the Doctor.

He watched as the seven Cybermen marched past, heading in the direction he and Jackie had just come from. "The caves," he whispered to her. "They're going to the caves for everyone else."

"But…but they don't know where to find all of them. Do they?"

"They aren't real, Jackie. They're a physical representation of a little girl's nightmares and she knows where everyone is."

Jackie gasped quietly next to him. "But if they know that…they'll kill everyone, the whole town."

"All the more reason to keep moving," he stated as he moved away from the edge of the house and further into town.

As they made their way slowly through the town, passed the empty homes and streets, no new threats or old ones appeared. The town seemed entirely abandoned.

"It's really quiet," Jackie whispered to herself as she looked around the empty roads and homes of the town.

The Doctor groaned to himself, his head lolling backwards in defeat, as he rubbed a hand over his face. "Jackie…saying 'it's really quiet' is a verbal shot in the foot. You're just asking for something to come along and prove you wrong. If you were in a burning building, you wouldn't make a comment about how hot it is. If you were outside in the middle of a rainstorm, you wouldn't say 'gee it sure is wet outside'. So why would you ever say 'it's really quiet' when you're in the middle of an almost completely deserted town… and is it suddenly getting darker out here?" the Doctor asked.

Jackie looked at him blankly, not sure if she was actually supposed to answer the questions, or even follow them, or not.

The Doctor turned away from her, his eyes searching the sky. "The sun," he said quietly to himself as he watched it slowly flicker in the sky.

"What does that mean?" Jackie asked as she turned to look at the sun as it faded darker and grew brighter again for a few moments.

"Either the fairytale is changing or…" he trailed off, eyes still glued to the sky.

"Or what, Doctor?"

"Or, the virtual reality is starting to shut down on itself," he said quietly, staring at the sky in abject horror. "This is too much for her. A whole reality, all of these places and things and she has to make them all. That's too much for a human mind to take."

"What does that mean?"

"It means the fairytales will end all on their own eventually…and her mind will burn up," the Doctor swallowed heavily. He knew the other him a universe away had just been forced to erase himself from Donna's mind for the very same reason and a wave of guilt and grief for something he didn't have any control over washed over him, but this wasn't the time or place to mourn the loss of Donna Noble, not if he was right about what was happening.

The longer they took to get to the girl, the less chance he had at being able to save her, to save everyone. The Doctor gritted his teeth as he finally looked away from the dimming sun overhead. "C'mon, Jackie, we don't have much time."

She chased after the Doctor as he moved along the narrow space between the houses, quickening her pace to match the longer, faster strides of the Doctor.

As they neared the edge of the last house the Doctor motioned for her to stop. This was it, just around this corner was Freya's house and their only chance at waking her daughter up.

The Doctor leaned forward slowly to look around the edge of the house. As his head peeked around the corner, a blast rang out, colliding with the building just above his head with a thundering smash, sending small bits of brick and mortar down on the Doctor's head.

The Doctor jumped back as the electronic voice of a Cyberman repeated its mantra of 'Delete' over and over again, each time punctuating the word with a blast, as it moved towards them. The Doctor and Jackie turned and began to run back the way they had just come.

Jackie refused to look back as she ran for what must have been the billionth time that night, the hauntingly empty word 'Delete' a constant encouragement from behind her. They passed the first row of houses and quickly made their way across the still empty road and onwards towards the next row, the word and the blasts from the laser following them the whole way.

The Doctor wasn't as reluctant to look behind them.

Almost as soon as the Cyberman had begun to chase the pair the time between each of its shots grew longer and longer. The Doctor slowed to a stop in the middle of the road, eyes fixed on the Cyberman trailing well behind them. No Cyberman was supposed to move that slowly.

Jackie darted across the rest of the road quickly only stopping to look back at the Doctor when she had ducked beside the house on the other side. "What are you doing?" she asked hurriedly, her eyes darting around them in search of any other Cybermen who might have been drawn in by the commotion they had caused. "Get out of the road, you daft alien!" she called to him desperately.

"It's slowing down," the Doctor said simply as he watched the Cyberman continue towards him ever slower. The Doctor furrowed his brow as he watched it let out a slow and strangled cry of 'Delete' and shoot towards him. The blast landed well in front of him and a bit to the left. Even if it hadn't gone short, it never would have hit him.

The Doctor watched the Cyberman for a moment more before shouting over his shoulder. "Jackie, get into the house."

"Which one?"

"Any house, just go!"

Jackie pushed herself away from the side of the building she had huddled against and dashed around to the front of it. She pushed the front door open and slid inside, the Doctor quickly turned and followed after her.

"What was that?" she asked him as he shut the door behind him and used the sonic to lock it for good measure before he pushed back a curtain on the small window next to the door to look outside. "Why was it moving so slowly?"

"The farther away we get from the girl, the weaker they are," the Doctor said as he let the curtain fall back into place. "The townspeople in the cave should be safe then."

Noticing Jackie's puzzled look out of the corner of his eye he turned to explain, "If he's that weak near the edge of town and relatively close to the girl, I'm not certain the others will even make it to the caves. And even if they do their weapons are more likely to cause a sting than actually hurt anyone."

"Well that's good. Isn't it?" Jackie asked carefully when the Doctor frowned.

"Yes. But that means it will be harder to get to her. She is the center of the power and the stasis pod is strengthening everything around her, protecting her mind just like it's supposed to do."

"But it's not protecting her."

"No, it's killing her."

"What happens if you don't get to her in time?" Jackie asked him solemnly, her face hard and her eyes sad. "If you can't wake her up before her brain shuts down?" she asked, the question 'What happens to Rose?' left floating in the air between them.

That was the problem, wasn't it? What was more important?

The Time Lord in him knew that answer was simple. If he saved the girl, he would save the town. He would save all of those people hiding in the caves for certain and anyone else being affected by a fairytale. He would save Rose. Even if it didn't work, if he couldn't get to the girl in time, he had to do everything in his power to at least try because the good of the many always outweighed the good of the few.

The ordinary human in him that told him, screamed in his head actually, that nobody else mattered. He had one short, fleeting life here on this world and it would be worthless without Rose. Everything that had happened, him existing even, it would all be worthless without her. What would be the point of having a second chance if he lost it the same night that he got it?

The number of times he had asked himself that question in just one night would have been funny if it weren't so depressing.

The fairytales would end either way and things would go back to normal in this small Norwegian town whether the girl woke up or not. So it really came down to one simple question. What was more important? One little girl he had never met, who he didn't know, or the love of his life?

He had spent hundreds of years making that choice, well not exactly that choice but close enough. Hundreds of years doing the right thing, sacrificing and saving the day no matter the cost to himself. He did it because no one else could, or because they wouldn't, but it was never an obligation. He did the right thing because it was the right thing to do, plain and simple and today wasn't going to be any different.

"Stay here, Jackie," the Doctor said as the moved past her, his shoulders set and eyes narrowed in resolution.

"What do you mean stay here? Where are iyou/i going?"

"Me?" he asked offhandedly as he pulled a sword out of a wall mount that adorned the hallway opposite the door they had just come through. He weighed the sword in his hand for a moment before he swung it around once. Apparently pleased with it, he turned back towards Jackie, the wide side of the blade coming to rest against his shoulder. "I'm going to save Rose."

~TBC


	18. Chapter 18

Title: Into the Woods (17/21)  
Pairing: TenII/Rose  
Rating: PG  
Genre: Action/adventure, romance, drama (just a smidge)  
Spoilers: Just to be safe let's say everything up to JE.  
Disclaimer: I don't own them and I make no money off of them (if anything it's the other way around)  
Summary: After being left on the beach the Doctor, Rose and Jackie are forced to stay overnight in a small Norway village until they can get home, but something strange is happening in the quiet town.  
Authors Note: Wow, this is almost over, its all action from here on in (well except the last chapter which is really an epilogue and thus shouldn't count anyhow)

Thank you to my amazing beta **mik109** I hope you're feeling better.

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The sun still hung high above them, even though the light it was giving off barely reached the levels found at dusk. Long deep shadows stretched along the road and between the buildings of the town, providing perfect cover for the daring rescue the Doctor had planned.

Well, he said planned.

The plan he had concocted was to run in and save Rose. What this entailed exactly was a bit of a mystery to even him. If it was anything like the fairytales he knew the castle would be guarded by something, be it trolls or goblins or an evil witch, and the rest of his plan would have to work around them.

Together he and Jackie had made their way around the slowly shambling Cyberman and back towards the heart of town. They moved quickly and quietly as they picked their way around empty houses and streets until they reached the last street between them and the town hall.

The Doctor moved out of the shadow from the home he and Jackie had ended up next too, ducking down and slowly moving forward to get a better view. He used the homes short fence as cover as he studied the outside of the fully transformed building.

The town hall had been an impressive building before but now it stood before them a huge castle, all dark stones and tall towers. A thick tangle of briar was beginning to grow around the front of the building and where the heavy front doors of the castle would have stood laid only splintered wood, apparently the damage the Cybermen had caused to it when they had broken in after the fleeing townspeople and themselves remained the same.

The little girl's mind might have begun fading but the castle remained seemingly untouched after all, maintaining something static was much easier than a walking, talking, not to mention shooting, thing.

"She'll be in the tower," he murmured quietly as he studied the front of the castle.

"What do you mean she's in the tower? How could she end up in the tower?" Jackie's voice cut through the silence as she crouched down next to him behind the low fence. "She was asleep when we left this bleedin' building the first time…she wasn't exactly up to walking around."

"I don't know she just will be."

"But-"

"Just try to remember, Jackie," he cut in, "and I know it's hard because it's been a very long time since then for you, but when you were a little girl did you care how the princess ended up in the tower of the castle or did you simply accept that she would be there?"

Jackie glowered at the question. How was she supposed to know that he was just making a wild guess? "I remember something else about those stories from iway/i back," she informed him crossly. "The castle was always guarded by something."

The Doctor sighed and looked back to the foreboding castle, his eyes darting this way and that in search of whatever happened to be guarding this particular castle. "Yes, they are."

"That's it? That's all you've got to say about it? If you don't even know what's in our way, how do expect to get past it?" Jackie asked in a harsh whisper as she stared at the Doctor.

"I'll think of something," Jackie boggled at him. "What? I always do. I once saved the world with nothing but a sword and a Satsuma," he reminded her indignantly before dismissively adding. "And I suppose some tea."

Jackie gasped and slapped his shoulder lightly. "A sword! What did you do with that one from the house?" she asked him hopefully. The Doctor, in turn, absentmindedly patted his right hand trouser pocket. "You put it in your pocket?" she said, not even trying to stay quiet, as she stared at the pocket he had indicated.

The Doctor turned to stare at Jackie for a moment. "Yes," he whispered back, giving her a puzzled look.

She knew his pockets were bigger on the inside but she just didn't realize by how much. Even knowing that, didn't answer how he fit the sword down there. The hand guard of the thing had to be wider than his pocket was. Besides, who in their right mind sees a sword and thinks 'let's pocket that for later use shall we?'

"You're just going to pull a sword out of your pocket and rush inside to save my daughter?" she asked angrily, clearly not impressed with this plan of action.

"Don't be silly," he said turning back towards the building. "I'll wait until I'm inside to take it out."

"You're mental."

"I did tell you to stay put, didn't I?"

"I didn't stay put when Rose told me to and that involved jumping to a different universe. What makes you think I'm going to do it for you when you're just going down the road a bit?"

He shook his head and looked back towards the castle muttering something about how the Tyler women always refused to listen to good sense.

"That's 'cause you'd get yourself killed if we did," Jackie muttered back to him with a roll of her eyes.

He ignored her as he checked the deserted road one last time. Nothing was moving anywhere on the street, or inside of the castle as far as he could tell, which meant he really was going to be rushing in without any idea of what was lying in wait. This wasn't a good idea at the best of times, and with Jackie to worry about as well as himself, this was decidedly not the best of times.

None of that really mattered though, because there wasn't anything that could possibly keep him from saving her. Besides, anything that was waiting for them inside would be weaker, or at the very least slower, than it had been originally.

He frowned to himself. That really was the last thing he wanted to be reminding himself of right now. He knew Iwhen/I he saved Rose she would have a few words for him about his choice to save her before trying to save the little girl. Angry or not, he was looking forward to the lecture because it meant she was safe.

"Come on, Jackie, and stay close," he said as he stood up slowly. "When we get inside, do what I say and don't argue with me," he continued as they crossed the street, his eyes never leaving the shattered doorway of the castle.

Jackie followed just behind the Doctor as they made their way towards the castle. 'One quasi Time Lord and an overbearing hairdresser turned rich housewife were hardly the kind of rescue team befitting the princesses found in fairytales' she thought sadly. But it wasn't like they had any other options at the moment and quasi or not the Doctor was still the only man she'd really trust to save her daughter at a time like this anyhow.

The Doctor slowly stepped over the threshold of the castle, his eyes fixed on the seemingly empty room ahead. Stepping past the doorway, he stood in the large room, his eyes flitting about in search of whatever was guarding the castle.

"Do you smell that?" asked Jackie in a harsh whisper as her nose scrunched up in disgust. "Smells like burning…Do you think that's from before?" she wondered as she looked at the Doctor who was still facing away from her.

"No. It smells like sulfur. Cybermen weapons don't smell like that," he said with a slight shake of his head. "Well, real Cybermen weapons don't smell like that. I suppose these Cybermen's weapons could smell like anything."

He continued on into the middle of the large room. "Still…What could smell like sulfur in here?" the Doctor asked in confusion as he looked around them. The room had changed even further from when they had first rushed in to escape the Cybermen.

The main entrance room stood completely open, three stories tall and octagon in shape. A spindly stairway stood just off to the side of where he stood, leading up to the next floor of the castle, and upwards still to the top floor. It reminded him of the central section of the cathedral he and Martha had chased Doctor Lazarus into, minus the pews and organ obviously.

Jackie stared up the stair along with the Doctor. "So, Rose'll be up there, then."

"Shh!" the Doctor hissed, his head whipping around towards the other side of the room. "What's that?" he asked quickly, turning in place as he tried to determine where the sound was coming from.

"I don't hear anything," Jackie said warily as she slowly moved backwards. When her back bumped into something solid and cold behind her, she gasped quietly and spun around to face it.

She was face to face with a long expanse of wall. She smiled ruefully at herself and shook her head as she turned back towards where the Doctor stood. She gave him a nervous grin and was about to tell him that he had her jumping out of her skin even when she was just bumping into walls.

The comment died on her lips, however, as a dark shadow caught the corner of her eye. She spun towards the shape but nothing seemed out of the ordinary. Well as ordinary as a fake castle in a town over run by fairytales could be.

A deep rumbling rolled through the room, echoing off the stone walls around the pair. "I heard that," Jackie muttered nervously, looking towards the Doctor as she began to edge her way towards the stairs to her left. "That sounds like something big," she mentioned hurriedly as she continued to sidestep towards the stairs, "and angry." She had seen Ithe Lord of the Rings/I, and IHarry Potter/I, things that made that sort of noise tended to be big and ugly and very very vicious.

The sound seemed to be coming from all around them. The acoustics of the room caused it to bounce and echo, or maybe whatever was doing the growling was really just circling them. "Jackie!" the Doctor shouted causing her to jump. He had just been about to tell her to go and find Rose when the sound stopped.

She mouthed the word 'What?' towards him, afraid to speak in case whatever had been making those noises had actually gone away. The last thing she wanted to do was make it come back 'cause she was talking.

The Doctor tilted his head trying to find any trace of the sound in the silence of the castle. He furrowed his brow, frowning at the sudden silence. Silence didn't bode well. It never did.

Jackie bounced nervously in place, refusing to move any farther until she was told to. She groaned uneasily before whispering, "Doctor!"

"Get to the stairs…Go find Rose," he whispered back to her his eyes still scanning the large room for any signs of danger.

A strange scrapping sound filled the room for a brief moment, freezing Jackie to the spot. It was like a stone being ground beneath something heavy, the kind of sound you'd expect when a mountain was crumbling in on itself, but nothing in the room moved. They heavy stench of sulfur faded just slightly as the grinding stopped. The heavy chandelier above them swayed back and forth in a stiff wind that kicked its way into the building from the narrow windows that dotted the walls.

The Doctor froze in place as the silence hung heavy throughout the castle. When he noticed that Jackie had remained motionless, he groaned to himself. "Jackie!" he whispered angrily, spinning around to look at her.

His complaint died as his eyes grew wide, eyebrows shooting up to his hairline, as he stared at the narrow window behind her. "RUN!"

She was off like a shot towards the stairs as the wall behind her began to crumble down. Heavy stone bricks littered the floor and dust filled the air as the wall finished crashing down, the sound of falling stone mingling with another angry growl and a heavy thud of a scaly tail against the stone floor.

As the dust settled, a hulking form stood in what remained of the castle wall. Its black hide glinted in the dusky light from outside. Its leathery wings pulled down tight against its body as it turned to face the intruders.

"That's a bleedin' dragon!" Jackie screamed as the beast whipped its tail back behind it.

"Go, Jackie! NOW!" the Doctor yelled at her as the dragon let loose a deafening roar.

He didn't have to tell her twice. Jackie took off again, doing her best to ignore the deep growls coming from the massive reptile behind her.

The Doctor faced down the huge beast. It was easily a story tall and at least twice that long. Its huge wings remained pulled against its body as it moved forward, snarling and snapping its massive fang filled jaws.

The dragon glared at the Doctor for a brief moment before turning towards the still running Jackie. It snorted in a deep breath and reared its large head back, its dark orange eyes squeezing shut.

The Doctor looked between the dragon and Jackie as realization dawned on him. "Jackie, duck!" he screamed.

Jackie fell to the ground with a startled yelp just as a ball of flames flew above her. The dragon gave a sad growl as the flames crashed into the wall behind Jackie. It looked back towards the Doctor and with a low roar whipped its tail out, smashing into him and sending him flying through the air.

The Doctor's body slammed into the wall just in front of Jackie. He crumpled to the ground with a grimace.

"Doctor!" Jackie shouted as quickly crawled towards him. "Are you alright?"

"I was just thrown across a room by a dragon. How do you think I am?" he asked angrily as he shoved his hand into his pocket, frantically searching for something.

"What are you gonna do? Slay the dragon?" Jackie asked incredulously as she stared at the dragon as it began to stalk towards them.

"Why would I ever do a thing like that?" he wondered aloud as his hand finally closed around the object he had been looking for. "Ah HA!" he shouted excitedly, holding the sonic screwdriver aloft with triumph.

"What are you going to do? Annoy it to death with that buzzing sound?!" Jackie shouted at him, the sentence turning into a frightened scream by the end as the dragon's tail again came crashing down next to them.

The dragon pulled its tail back, bits of the broken floor falling off it and littering the area around the Doctor and Jackie before slamming it down again. The Doctor pushed Jackie away from him as the dragon's tail came smashing down right where she had been standing, thumping against the cold stone floor between them both.

"Jackie, stairs!" the Doctor yelled over the sound of the dragon's growls and crushing tail. "I'm going to take care of the dragon," he said simply as he watched the beast.

Without wasting a moment Jackie bounded over to the stairs and began to make her way up them. The dragon turned to watch Jackie as she moved quickly up the stone steps. It sneered evilly and began to move towards her.

"Hey! OVER HERE! Look at me!" the Doctor shouted jumping up and down, waving his hands frantically above its head in an attempt to get the creatures attention. It worked, too. The dragon turned away from Jackie, who was already up the first floor's worth of stairs, and started after the Doctor.

"I know how to take care of you. Setting 438!" he said victoriously as he aimed the sonic at the dragon. Its high pitched whine filled the room and the dragon grew quiet for a moment as it regarded him oddly. The Doctor let off the trigger to the screwdriver and the dragon let loose its tail once again.

The Doctor leaped out of the way just as the tail came crashing down in the spot where he had just been standing. "It didn't work. Why didn't it work? That was the dragon setting!" he shouted confused and angry. The dragon should be asleep or, at the very least, sulking out of the castle with a very bad headache.

The Doctor dove behind the stairs case, noting in the back of his mind that Jackie had almost made it to the top landing. 'Maybe the dragon setting was 348' he thought as he flipped through different settings on the screwdriver. It definitely had those three numbers, or was it a six instead of an eight?

The dragon reared up on its hind legs tail swinging quickly downward, smashing straight through the stone staircase. All of the stairs below where its tail landed remained upright and still offered the Doctor a decent hiding place, but the few stairs just above that section tumbled downwards, shattering when they landed on the ground below.

The dragon swung its tail down again. This time hitting the short section of stairs the Doctor was hiding behind as well as more of the remaining stairs floating above the wrecked section as it slammed down. Even more of the stone stairway came crumbling down. There was now a massive gap in the stairway far too wide to jump. What was left of the stairway began to sway uneasily in the air, large chunks of it falling off and plummeting down towards where the Doctor was still hid.

Now, the Doctor was left with little more than rubble to try and hind behind. He continued to twist and turn the sonic's controls frantically in an attempt to find the right setting. Setting 348 was for opening particularly stubborn jar lids and thus was completely useless in putting a dragon to sleep. He began to move through the various settings on the screwdriver at an even faster pace.

The dragon fell back on all fours and began to stomp around the mess of stones that was left of the stairs. It let out a low, hot growl as it stalked slowly around the pile, its forked tongue darting out to taste the air around it.

The Doctor grunted in frustration. The dragon would peer its slick black head around the corner any second, now, and he still hadn't found the correct setting on the sonic screwdriver. He needed a plan B, seeing as plan A was well and fully useless. He remembered the sword in his pocket but quickly decided that would get him killed just as quickly as the screwdriver would.

He leaned back heavily against what remained of the stairs. As he ran a hand dejectedly through his hair, something interesting caught his eye. A heavy black linked chain was anchored to the wall just in front of him. His eyes quickly followed the path of the chain upwards to the large chandelier it was holding up.

The Doctor's eyebrows rose as he looked back at the point where the chain was anchored. "Always wanted to try this," he said under his breath, quickly flipping to a well used setting on the screwdriver before jumping up and shooting towards the chain.

He wrapped his arm around the heavy chain and shouted 'bye bye' over his shoulder with a grin as he pointed the sonic screwdriver at the links of the chain just below where he was holding on. The sonic buzzed into life and a metal tink rang out.

The heavy chandelier started to fall, sending the Doctor flying upwards. The dragon's head darted up from behind the remains of the stairs, mouth snapping after the Doctor with a loud clack of teeth. Before the dragon was able to get off another bite, the heavy chandelier smashed into the creature's head, knocking it out cold.

The chandelier tumbled to the ground next to the dragon's head, bits of broken metal and shattered glass spreading out around it like a halo.

The Doctor looked down at the subdued beast as he hung midair on the chain a foot away from the landing. "Better than Shrek," he said with a grunt of exertion before he began to swing himself back and forth. After a moment, the soles of his red trainers landed with a soft thud on the stone landing. He let heavy the chain go, the end of it thudded against what remained of the railing for the stairs.

He straightened his suit jacket as he walked down the hallway that lead off of the landing. He strode to the end of it and pushed through the wooden door there and was immediately met by Jackie.

"Did you take care of the dragon?" she asked hurriedly.

"Don't worry about him. Did you find Rose?"

Jackie solemnly pointed behind him. The Doctor quickly whirled around, his gaze intently following her finger.

His breath caught in his throat. Rose lay in the middle of an enormous canopy bed, her hair fanned out across the silky pillows. A shaft of light from somewhere he couldn't place bathed her in a golden glow. Her black pants and blue leather jacket had morphed into a dress, long and white with a bodice that matched the color of the shirt she had been wearing. Exactly the kind of dress you'd expect of the princess found in a castle guarded by a dragon to wear.

He ran across the room and dropped to his knees at her side. "Rose?"

"She's not going to answer. I've tried everything, and she never even flinched at that racket with the dragon."

The Doctor fell silent and watched the still slumbering woman in front of him. She looked so young like this, like she did when he first met her. She had always looked younger when she slept, most humans do after all, the picture of pure innocence. He would never admit it but, at least when they had been stuck sharing a room for the night during their travels, he had always derived a deep peace of mind from watching her sleep.

"Kiss her."

The Doctor's head snapped up, his eyes boring into her at the sound of her voice. "Jackie…"

"I know what you said before but I'm telling you that little girl expects the prince to wake the princess up with a kiss. So just kiss her and we can get out of this bleeding place."

The Doctor studied Jackie, who just jerked her head toward her daughter demanding he get on with it. He sighed and turned back to Rose. It was typical of their relationship really. They never got to kiss each other just because they wanted to. Well, yes, once. They did get the kiss on the beach. It didn't matter how bittersweet it was in the long run. It still technically counted.

Other than that one instance though, they never got to enjoy kissing one another. They were either doing it to save the other one from dying or because they were possessed by a youth crazed human or a helmet got in the way. Though really that last one shouldn't count. It would have just been to the forehead regardless of the helmet.

He sighed to himself and decided that, in the grand tradition of their relationship, being kissed to break a spell wasn't so bad.

He slowly reached forward, gently cupping her face in the palm of his hand. It was still surprising how much cooler she felt now that he had changed, when it was in fact just because his body temperature was no longer so drastically colder than that of an average human. He let out a shaky breath, be it from nerves or anxiety, and leaned forward slowly stopping just a hairsbreadth away from her lips.

"Rose," he repeated in a whisper as soft as the one he had used on the beach earlier that day. "I am mostly, well partly, human now, and I do not have a hundred years to wait for you to wake up. So please Rose, wake up for me."

He leaned forward, his lips softly brushing against her own. It wasn't anything like they described it in the bedtime stories. It wasn't some grand romantic gesture. It wasn't a moment that deserved to be punctuated with epic, romantic music. Kisses like that required a reaction from the other party, and Rose remained frozen in place.

The Doctor leaned back slightly, his hand still splayed across her cheek, his thumb gently stroking it as he watched her face intently.

Jackie frowned as she watched the Doctor let loose a ragged breath as his hand fell away from Rose's face. "What? What is it? What's wrong?"

The Doctor stood up slowly. "It didn't work," he stated simply his voice cold as he stared down at the still sleeping Rose. "She didn't wake up."

~TBC

AN2: Yes the Doctor watched Shrek, and Shrek 2, he very smartly (he is brilliant after all) refused to see the third one and is a happier person because of this.

_Also, depending on reviews I could be persuaded to post the next chapter tonight since I don't know how much time I'll have on Friday._


	19. Chapter 19

Title: Into the Woods (18/21)  
Pairing: TenII/Rose  
Rating: PG  
Genre: Action/adventure, romance, drama (just a smidge)  
Spoilers: Just to be safe let's say everything up to JE.  
Disclaimer: I don't own them and I make no money off of them (if anything it's the other way around)  
Summary: After being left on the beach the Doctor, Rose and Jackie are forced to stay overnight in a small Norway village until they can get home, but something strange is happening in the quiet town.  
Authors Note: Two in one day because I don't want to leave anyone with a horrible cliffhanger until Saturday.

Thank you to my amazing beta **mik109** I hope you're feeling better.

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Jackie looked from her daughter's slumbering face to the man who stood next to her searching for a way to have this all make sense to her. "Maybe we've got the wrong story?"

"That's not the problem," he explained curtly, eyes still fixed on Rose.

"Then what is it?"

"It's me," he muttered quietly, the words cutting through him as he said them.

"What? What do you mean it's you?"

"I'm not him."

"What?"

"It didn't work because I'm not him. I'm not the man she loves."

"'Course you are."

"No, Jackie, I'm not. I'm just a duplicate, second best, a consolation prize. Her true love is in a parallel world traveling through all of time and space."

Jackie stared at the downtrodden man for a moment before barking out a mirthless laugh. "What a load," Jackie said a far more angry tone than she had intended. "You're the same man, Doctor. I've seen it. If you think anyone, other than the Doctor, could have figured out what was happening here, or could have fought off a dragon…" she trailed off with a disbelieving shake of her head. "'Sides I've seen you an' her, too. It's exactly the same. 'S like nothing's changed."

Her heart broke for him a little as he stared at her with wide disbelieving eyes. She had never seen him look more lost or alone than he did at that moment. She wanted nothing more than for her daughter to wake up and give him one of those megawatt smiles she saved just for him.

A meek roar ripped through the uneasy silence of the castle, jerking both the Doctor's and Jackie's attention away from each other, and Rose, and towards the wooden door of the room.

Jackie's face went from sad to scared and confused to angry in a split second as she began to glare at the Doctor. "I thought you said you took care of the dragon!"

"I never said that. I said don't worry about it."

Jackie stared at him in open mouthed bewilderment. "Don't argue semantics!" Jackie bellowed as the Doctor darted past her and out the door towards the stairway.

"I thought it was out cold," he threw over his shoulder as he ran, Jackie hot on his heels.

A thunderous snarling sound filled the open room of the castle entrance. The Doctor leaned over the railing, staring down at where the still slightly dazed dragon had begun to move again. Jackie stood in the doorframe just behind him with concern.

"I had really hoped it would stay out for longer than that," the Doctor whined as the dragon shook its head and let loose another roar.

As the sound reverberated through the castle, Jackie stared at the open door as it shook on its hinges. "Whatever you did, I think it's mad at you," Jackie said nervously as she peeled her eyes away from the doorway as another roar, this time louder than the previous three had been, tore through the castle.

The dragon reared onto its hind legs, its huge wings unfurling behind it with a mighty whoosh of air. They began to flap back and forth as fast as they could in the cramped space of the castle, slowly lifting the giant creature off the ground.

The Doctor watched in a sort of detached amazement as the dragon began to fly up towards him. It really was a thing of beauty, and if he wasn't about to most likely die horribly at the creature's claws, he would have savored the moment more than he currently was. As it was, all he could get himself to do was shout over his shoulder for Jackie to hide.

The creature's head was almost level with the landing now. Its breath was hot and smelt of ash as it huffed out a low and angry growl. It pitched its head back for a moment, sucking in a huge gulp of air, readying to throw another burst of flame at the Doctor.

"Doctor!"

He spun around as the familiar voice shouted out his name. The scowl on his face melting away as his eyes settled on the figure in the doorway. "Rose?" he called out, his voice a mixture of disbelief and utter joy. She woke up. He took a step forward, that huge manic grin of his breaking across his face.

The sound of the dragon's furious roar, accompanied by a ball of flames, snapped his attention back to the present. He ducked down as the flames flew just narrowly over his head, the flames bursting across the wall just next to the door where Rose stood. The Doctor jumped away from the now smoldering wall as memories of a long deserted road and a Dalek popped into his head briefly, the sound of Rose screaming his name ringing in his ears.

The dragon snorted as the fire licked the quickly blackening wall next to him, obviously displeased with having missed him yet again. He took the dragon's pause as his cue to rush back into the hallway.

He slammed the door shut behind him and swept Rose close in one smooth motion. Her arms wrapped around him as he buried his face in her neck. He breathed out a happy sigh and squeezed her to him even tighter.

"What's going on?" He heard her whisper next to his ear as she began to lean out of the hug.

He leaned back just slightly, his arms remaining stubbornly wrapped around her waist as he watched her.

"Why am I wearing a dress?" Rose asked as she looked down at herself. "And since when were we in a castle?"

"It's not a castle. Well, not really. Its town hall and the dress is because you're the princess in a little girl's fairy story," the Doctor answered as if it was the most normal thing he had said all day.

Rose raised an eyebrow at him in puzzlement before shaking her head. "Right, I'm just going to pretend that makes sense until we aren't being attacked by a dragon."

He gave her a mad grin, one of his hands moving up from her waist to gently cup her face. He stared at her for a moment, his smile faltering only slightly as if he didn't really believe she was there. Rose placed her own hand over his and leaned into the touch. She might not remember anything past falling into the basement of the town hall, but she knew whatever had happened had to have been serious for the Doctor to be looking at her like that.

"Hi," she said quietly unable to help the large grin spreading across her face as she stared at him.

"Hello," he replied back, his grin growing even wider if it were at all possible. "You woke up."

Roses face scrunched up in that adorable confused face he used to dream about seeing again, a face he was thrilled to know he'd get to see again and again for the rest of his life. "Course I woke up. When your own knight in pinstripes kisses you it's kind of hard to sleep through," she said, her own megawatt smile slipping into place.

"I was worried there for a minute. When you didn't," he told her quietly. "Shouldn't have been of course. It only made sense that it'd take more time for you to wake up since you were being affected by the virtual reality and everything was going slower…" he began to explain a mile-a-minute only to be cut off by Jackie.

"Oh, please," she grumbled under her breath. "We're going to be killed any second now and you two are doing that?" she asked angrily, getting them both to turn and look at her apologetically. "You know sometimes I think the only reason either of you save the universe is because the other one happens to exist in it."

Rose took a small, reluctant step away from the Doctor, her hands moving down to smooth the bodice of her dress so they could have something to do other than hold onto the Doctor. "She's got a point."

"Course I have a point."

Rose ignored her mother and looked at the Doctor, biting her thumbnail nervously. "How, exactly, are we supposed to fight a giant fire-breathing reptile?" Rose asked him with complete seriousness.

The Doctor's face grew stoic for a brief moment. "Reptile!" he shouted his hands shooting up to grab a hold of Rose's shoulders. "You're brilliant!" he stated placing a quick kiss to her forehead before spinning around and running back towards the dragon as fast as he could move.

Rose wrapped the extra material of her dress in her hands and followed quickly after him, thankful that at least she was still wearing flats. She came through the doorway, the odor of burnt wood hanging heavy in the air around her. She coughed once, her nose scrunching up at the smell, but noticed no sign of the dragon anywhere.

At the edge of the landing stood the Doctor, sonic screwdriver held up before him, its blue tip gleaming brightly in the smoky air. He turned to look at her over his shoulder, smiling wildly. "It's not a real dragon. I didn't need the dragon setting. I needed the one for reptiles," he said gleefully. "How's a little girl from Norway supposed to know dragons aren't actually at all reptilian?"

The buzzing of the screwdriver died as the Doctor turned towards Rose. "There we are then," he said with a jerk of his head over the side of the railing.

Rose walked over next to him, her eyes fixed on the massive brute curled up on the floor of the castle.

"He'll be asleep for a good long while," he said with a self satisfied grin before turning to face Rose completely.

"That's a dragon," Rose stated pointing down at the peacefully slumbering lizard below fighting back a small laugh at the sight of the mighty beast as it kicked its leg like a dog dreaming about chasing cars.

"Yup," the Doctor said popping the p a grin slipping into place as he watched Rose.

Her grin faded after a moment of watching the dragon though. "Ummm, Doctor. How are we supposed to get down?" she asked as she cautiously peered over the edge of the mostly charred landing, staring down at the ruined remains of the stairs below.

"Oh, right….ummm," the Doctor muttered as he too looked down at their wrecked escape route, his hands coming to rest on her waist protectively.

"Didn't really think about that, did you?"

"I did have other things on my mind," he admitted. "How much do you think that chandelier weighs?"

"Why?"

He raised his eyebrows at her, a grin tugging at his face. Rose looked at him for a moment, baffled by his lack of an answer before she glanced back down towards the chandelier then back to him quickly, realization dawning on her face. "What, you're serious?" she asked him as his grin grew even wider.

"Why not?"

"What about my Mum?"

The Doctor looked at Jackie and then back to Rose. "She can come, too. Actually she might have to come. I doubt it weighs more than both of us but it most certainly will weigh less than all three of us."

Rose shook her head, a huge grin on her face, which he took to mean that she agreed. His smile grew even wider at the sight of her tongue poking out from between her teeth.

"Come along now, Jackie," he shouted towards her as he and Rose grabbed onto the thick chain and moved towards the section of the landing where the railing had been burnt completely away.

"Oh, you've got to be kidding me!"

"It's faster than the stairs would have been," he added helpfully.

Jackie just glared.

"It's not going to work with just me and the Doctor," Rose said plaintively as her mother continued to glare at the Doctor. "'Sides I'm not leavin' ya up here on your own."

Jackie heaved a put-upon sigh as she shuffled towards them, reluctantly grabbing onto the heavy chain. The Doctor gave her a half grin before looking back to Rose who took a hold of the chain as far above her as she could reach.

"Jackie, you swing off first," he said as he placed his hands on the chain just above Rose's.

"Why do I have to go first?" she squeaked out as she stared in horror at the pair.

"Because you're at the end."

"So?"

"So, if we go first there's going to be too much slack and you'll fall instead of slowly descending," The Doctor explained as though it were the most obvious thing in the world.

"Well, I'll just wait an' go after you."

"Then you'll have to jump from the ledge over to where the chain is going to be hanging."

"But-"

"Look!" Rose cut in before things got out of hand. "I'll switch you spots okay?" she asked her mother gently as she let go of the chain.

"But-" It was the Doctor's turn to squeak in protest.

Rose shot him a sympathetic look as she took a hold of the chain right where her mother had just been standing.

He turned to glare at the chain for a moment weighing how silly it would seem to the Tyler women if he just moved over to where Rose was. He snorted derisively at himself and decided that he didn't care. "Make sure you hold tight, Jackie," he said sternly before moving over to again place his hands just above where Rose's were on the chain.

She bit her lower lip in an attempt to keep from breaking out into a huge grin as he stared down at her. Whatever had happened while she had been asleep must have been important because he didn't seem to want to take his eyes off her for even a second, or move farther than a few inches away if he could help it.

"Off we go then," he whispered as he pushed away from the ledge along with Rose.

Together, they slowly began to sink down towards the mess his fight with the dragon had created below. A second later, a loud squeak let them both know Jackie had finally slid off the edge of the landing.

"What's that sound?" Jackie shouted, her eye's firmly closed.

"It's just the pulley for the chain," the Doctor answered her with a roll of his eyes. "I don't know how you've dealt with her your whole life," he muttered to Rose, who rolled her eyes in return.

"Is it gonna break?"

"No…" The Doctor said with a look that made Rose think he believed the opposite.

She stared at him wide-eyed, her eyebrows shooting up in worry.

"It'll be fine," he told her quietly, again with an overly sure nod of his head. "Besides, even if it isn't, we only have a few feet to go," he said with a nod of his head towards the ground.

Rose looked down at the quickly approaching floor. "Wait a sec. What happens when we reach the ground?"

He gave her a puzzled look.

"When we reach the ground, our weight isn't going to be pulling the chandelier up anymore. It's going to come crashing down on top of us and take my Mum back up to the top."

"Ah," he said with a smug grin, "that's why I have this." He wiggled the sonic screwdriver in front of her face. "Just have to lock the pulley in place and presto," he said with a buzz of the sonic pointed at the castle ceiling. They stopped moving downwards instantly, the toes of his shoes brushing the floor.

"Why'd we stop moving? Is everything alright?" Jackie called out desperately.

"It's okay, Mum," Rose called up to her as she let go of the chain. "You're going to have to slide down a little bit though," she added reluctantly as she looked up at her mother who was stuck on the chain a good two meters above the ground.

"What? How far?" she asked as she tightened her grip around the chain.

The Doctor shook his head and pulled an unimpressed face as he looked up at her. "Oh, it's nothing. Just a little, tiny two meters."

"What?!" she bellowed, her vice-like grip growing even stronger.

"Well I did tell you to go first," the Doctor pointed out unhelpfully earning him an angry groan from Jackie.

"If you just loosen up your arms, you can just slide down it like a firemen's pole," Rose tried to reason with her.

"Or," the Doctor began slowly, "you could just stay there and never let go."

Rose leveled an exasperated glare at him for that comment, one he returned with a mouthed 'what' and a meager shrug of his shoulders. Jackie groaned in annoyance, muttering about an 'insufferable man' and loosened her grip, slowly sliding the rest of the way down to the floor.

Jackie let out a nervous sigh as she let go of the chain completely and finally opened her eyes.

"That wasn't so hard was it?" the Doctor asked her simply.

"Hard?" she bellowed at him, causing the dragon to twitch in its sleep.

The three of them all stared at the dragon as a low growl rumbled through its chest.

"Maybe we should go outside," Rose whispered as she stared at the dragon.

Jackie nodded madly as she turned and quickly jogged out of the castle. The Doctor grabbed onto Rose's hand and threaded their fingers together as he followed after her mother at a brisk pace.

~TBC Saturday


	20. Chapter 20

Title: Into the Woods (19/21)  
Pairing: TenII/Rose  
Rating: PG  
Genre: Action/adventure, romance, drama (just a smidge)  
Spoilers: Just to be safe let's say everything up to JE.  
Disclaimer: I don't own them and I make no money off of them (if anything it's the other way around)  
Summary: After being left on the beach the Doctor, Rose and Jackie are forced to stay overnight in a small Norway village until they can get home, but something strange is happening in the quiet town.  
Authors Note: Well this is frighteningly close to being finished. Two more chapters and I'll disappear for who knows how long. Also note that you should not post links to your story in communities when you are tired (you end up linking to the wrong chapter.)

Thank you to my amazing beta lj user="mik109" I hope you're feeling better.

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"What, exactly, is going on here?" Rose asked as soon as they had made it out of the castle, pulling the Doctor to a stop in the middle of the road.

The Doctor stared down at her for a short moment, hand still wrapped around hers.

"They're fairytales, just like I said, but they aren't real. None of this is real," he said plainly. "It's a virtual reality being formed by the imagination of a little girl. A specific little girl," he clarified needlessly. "Freya's daughter. Her brain has been hooked into a stasis pod from a crashed ship near the edge of town. With it she's creating all of this," he said with a glance around them.

"If she's making all of this because of a stasis pod then…if we turn it off she'll wake up and everything will go back to normal, right?" she asked helpfully, working at Torchwood these last few years had definitely trained her to stay on mission, especially in situations where people could get hurt.

He shook his head mutely. "The ships systems are all down except for the pod, it's drawing its energy from a natural power source. Which means I can't turn it off and wake her up," he told her gravely.

"And?" Rose prompted as she watched him carefully. "What does that mean?" She knew he was holding something back, he only ever gave her that sullen stiffed jaw look when he wasn't telling her the whole story.

"And…" he started with a deep breath, "it's killing her."

Rose nodded slowly. "How do we save her?"

"All virtual reality programs are built with a backdoor in them, a failsafe, a way for the individual inside of the program to exit it. If I can get to her, I might be able to lead her out of the program on her own."

Rose nodded again. "Right, so we'll do that then," she told him firmly with a warm smile and a squeeze of her hand.

He began to shake his head slowly. "It's too dangerous."

Rose's eyebrows shot up as she stared at him in shock. She never imagined she'd ever hear him say those three words. Okay, there were another three she had never imagined she'd hear him say and he'd proven her wrong earlier that day, but that didn't change anything. He was always finding trouble wherever he went, and he gladly strolled into it no matter how dangerous it was.

"I mean it," he said quickly. "Creating all of this is weakening her mind. This virtual reality is breaking down around us. It wasn't meant to pull an entire town into it so it's treating anything that isn't that little girl like a virus on a computer. It's searching them out and destroying them. The things we encounter out here are slow and weak compared to the defenses surrounding that little girl. It'll be like waltzing into the lion's den."

"Oh, and you never do that, do you?" she asked accusingly, dropping his hand so she could cross her arms over her chest.

"I didn't say I wasn't going," he answered her sternly.

"What? And I'm just supposed to stay here, then, am I?"

"Yes," he said turning away and beginning to walk towards the middle of town. He had saved Rose. Now, he could save the little girl.

"You can't just decide that for me," Rose said angrily as she stared openmouthed after him. "You don't get to leave me behind and go face danger all on your own. That's not how this works."

The Doctor continued to walk, ignoring her as he did so. Frustrated, Rose gathered up her skirt and stomped after him. Jackie, who had decided to stay out of the argument altogether, followed a good ways behind them.

"Doctor, stop," Rose called after him.

"I can't," he said back to her, his back stiffening and his voice taking on a dangerous tone.

"What do you mean, you can't?"

"I just…I can't."

"You can't stop?"

"I can't lose you!" he spun around and shouted back at her. "I can't do that. I lost you on that beach two years ago and I thought I lost you on that street with the Dalek and again tonight and I can't do it. Not again."

She stared at him solemnly as he rubbed a hand on the back of his neck, both completely oblivious to Jackie, who stood several meters behind them intently studying the doorframe of a nearby house.

"You keep me fighting, Rose, and I need you to be safe. I saved you first because I had to know you were okay. You are all I have, and I am not going to lose you to a piece of broken alien technology."

"What about you? I'm not the only one that can get hurt."

"I'll be -"

"Don't you dare say you'll be fine," she shouted at him angrily. "What am I supposed to do if something happens to you? You're not indestructible you know. You can't regenerate anymore," she said placing her hand over his heart and staring up at him. "One heart. one life. Remember?"

"Rose…" he pleaded with her weakly.

"We've got to do this together," she pushed on, ignoring his protests. "Just like when we were traveling 'round. We save the universe, together." She punctuated the sentence by grabbing his hand tightly in her own.

She refused to move, one hand spread out across his chest while the other was wrapped around his own. She stared down at where her hand rested against his chest, the steady thumping of his one heart fast under her palm. She could be just as stubborn as he was and this was definitely a fight she wasn't going to lose.

"It's not the same," he whispered, using his free hand to tilt her face up towards his. "Rose, you are all I have here."

"What makes you think it's any different for me? I told you before I'm never gonna leave you."

They stared at each other for a long time. Rose's shoulders set in determination while the Doctor's slumped dejectedly downward. He took a deep breath and squeezed her hand as tightly as he could before nodding his head. The movement was so small Rose barely registered it before he had turned and begun walking towards the center of town again, never dropping her hand. If she refused to stay behind, then he wasn't going to let her out of his sight for a second.

Rose followed the Doctor closely, her eyes shooting up to the sky above them. The sun grew steadily weaker as they made their way towards the house. It was now almost completely out, giving the deserted town an even more eerily dead feeling.

Hand in hand the two of them, followed by Jackie, started to pick their way through the small alleyways and roads of the town.

He was becoming an expert at stealthily sneaking around this town, the Doctor thought wryly as he avoided a particularly nasty pot hole that was camouflaged by a tuft of tall grass. Unfortunately, Rose was not an expert and tripped on her dress as it caught on the edge of the pot hole.

"Ugh, bloody dress," Rose groaned as she dropped the Doctor's hand in frustration and leaned over to gather the skirt of the dress in her hands.

"You look beautiful in it though," the Doctor said seriously as he looked down at her.

Rose glanced up at him. "It's impractical. Why do you think I stopped wearing 'em after you took me to Cardiff in 1869?"

"Is that why you stopped wearing them?"

"Yeah. Why? What did you think the reason was?"

"You were distracting," he said like it was the most obvious thing in the world. "I could hardly keep my eyes off of you and that was back when I was standoffish, no telling what I would have done after I regenerated," he answered her simply. "I might have mauled you," he realized suddenly, slightly shocked by the idea.

A sly grin began to work its way across Rose's face at his worried look. "Well I'm in a dress now and you haven't mauled me yet."

His eyes snapped back to her face. "No, but I haven't been able to keep my hands off of you either," he pointed out, noting how his voice dipped down as he said the words and noticed the light blush working its way across her cheeks.

Jackie shook her head and moved past the stationary pair. "Quit flirting, you two," she muttered as she continued down the side of the house, throwing over her shoulder. "Only two more blocks and we'll be at the house."

Flushing slightly, Rose quirked a small smile at the Doctor before following her mother. He returned her smile and, once she looked forward again, grimaced at her mother's back over dramatically. He couldn't wait for this to all be done with. Of all of the people he'd teamed up with to save the day Jackie was certainly the most tiresome of them all.

The Doctor jogged to catch up with Rose, linking his arm with hers instead of grabbing for her hand so she could continue carrying the unwieldy skirt. They briefly exchanged smiles before he noticed her mother was about to step out of their sight around the last corner to Freya's house. "Jackie, I wouldn't do that if I were you. Not unless you want to be the target of whatever remains of the pod's defenses," he observed blithely.

Jackie stopped immediately, placed her hands on her hips and waited with obvious impatience for them to reach her.

"Allow me," the Doctor suggested when they pulled abreast of Jackie. He squeezed Rose's arm briefly before releasing her to step up to the edge of the building.

The Doctor leaned around the corner of the house and stiffened as his eyes fixed on the small house across the road. A dozen Cybermen stood between them and the building, shoulder to shoulder in two even and unmoving rows. A solid metal wall.

He quirked an eyebrow after a moment of studying them. Their eyes were all glossy black and glinted in the near dark of the night. "My fight with the dragon must have worn her out."

"What do you mean?" Rose asked from just behind him, her voice close to his ear as she peeked around his shoulder to study the Cybermen.

"They're all off. Look at their eyes," he said, turning to look at her profile as it hovered next to his face. "They could be conserving energy. Which means they won't turn on until something moves in front of them and wakes them up, or-"

"Or that little girl has less time than we thought she did," Rose said gravely. "So, any bright ideas?" she asked hopefully as she turned to look him in the eye.

"If they're conserving power and they're that close to her, that means they'll be sluggish even if they do turn on. If not, then we barge in and they don't move."

"So we're just going to make a mad dash for it?" Jackie asked from behind the two, reminding them she was still there.

"Nothing wrong with a bit of a duck and run," he said with a noncommittal shrug.

"Yeah, and I know how much you love running," Rose said with a grin towards the Doctor.

The Doctor smirked at her and pushed away from the wall of the house. Rose held onto her skirts even tighter, readying herself. Jackie just rolled her eyes and sighed before leaning forward next to Rose.

"On three?" suggested Rose. The Doctor nodded sharply and she began to count, "One."

As the number left her mouth the Doctor burst out from behind the wall before they could react. With a frustrated groan Rose followed after him, Jackie hot on her heels.

The Doctor skid to a halt in the middle of the road and Rose slowed to a brisk jog until she came to his side.

The Cybermen hadn't moved. The Doctor walked towards them cautiously, Rose and Jackie just behind him. The Cybermen didn't turn towards the trio or lift their arms up to fire upon them. There wasn't even a flicker of light in their dead eyes. All of them stood stalk still.

He frowned at the nearest Cyberman, regarding it with a puzzled kind of loathing. "C'mon, they're all off," he said quietly, never looking away from them as he gestured for Rose and Jackie to join him.

Together they slipped around the end of the row of still unmoving Cybermen. The Doctor shoved open the gate and leapt up the stairs with his trusty sonic screwdriver already in his hand. Quickly unlocking the front door, he threw it open and ushered the Tyler women inside before stepping across the threshold himself.

The door slammed shut behind him and the lock slid into place easily. He turned towards the two woman that stood before him at the end of a short staircase. To his left was a small living room that gave way to a kitchen and to his right was what he assumed was a loo and a closed door, possibly a study or a spare bedroom given the house had two stories.

"We have to find that little girl," the Doctor breathed urgently from his spot in front of the heavy front door.

"Freya?" Rose shouted up the stairway though she didn't move to go up them. Together they waited in silence for a reply. A frown began to work its way across the Doctors face as none came.

"You don't think she…I mean, the program wouldn't've…" Rose's question trailed off as she turned back to look at him.

When he refused to meet her eyes, Rose knew he wasn't very hopeful. He had said the program would treat everyone who wasn't the little girl like a computer virus, and if Freya wasn't answering, the odds were it was because she couldn't.

The Doctor pushed away from the front door, his mind made up. He had dealt with enough death over the last day, Daleks and murderous fairytales gone wrong, fake Cyberman haunting a little girls troubled mind. He wasn't going to let that happen to this little girl, not if he could help it.

He moved towards the closed door to his right and pulled it open. He was met with the cold metal body of a Cyberman. The Doctor slammed the door shut once again and backed away from it quickly. The door burst back open, smashing against the wall, as the Cyberman marched towards them silently. The Doctor continued to back up pushing Rose behind him as they moved away from the Cyberman, Jackie falling in behind her.

The metal figure loomed before them, its red eyes glowing in the dark of the house. Together, the three of them continued to back up until they had made their way into the living room, the whole while the Cyberman moved towards them silent and menacing.

"Shouldn't it be saying something?" Jackie asked nervously as the back of her leg bashed into the edge of a chair behind her. She almost fell backwards, only just barely catching herself on the wall.

"Yes," the Doctor spat out uneasily as they continued to back up.

"Then, why isn't it?" Jackie demanded.

"And why doesn't it just shoot us?" Rose asked as the Cyberman suddenly stopped moving forwards as soon as it reached the foot of the stairs.

The Doctor stopped moving as well and stared at the Cyberman in front of him like it was some kind of math equation he was trying to solve. "Because it can't," he said as he stared at the Cyberman, "it'd take too much power." The Doctor frowned at the lone Cyberman as it loomed before them.

"There's only one of you left working now. Isn't there?" the Doctor asked as he took a step towards it. "And you can't shoot us. You can't even speak," he leaned to his side to look around the Cyberman's body towards the closed off room it had come from. "The little girl's in there, then."

"Freya?" Rose shouted as she continued to watch the Cyberman. "Freya, you in there?"

A quiet scuffling noise came from the room before Freya appeared in the doorway. "Rose?" she called worriedly. "These things just showed up out of nowhere an-and my daughter…" she began to explain frantically her sentence breaking up with a choked sob. "I-I think she's…"

"It's okay. We're gonna help."

"How're we gonna do that?" Jackie asked her daughter quietly enough so Freya couldn't hear her.

"He isn't going to just let us walk past him like the others outside," the Doctor said firmly drawing everyone's attention back towards him and the Cyberman.

"What do we do?"

"You go, get to the girl, and try to wake her up," he said, his eyes never once moving away from the Cyberman.

"Don't you think her mother would have tried that already?" Jackie asked indignantly as she stared at the approaching Cyberman.

"Oh, just go, Jackie," he said through gritted teeth as he pulled the sword he had picked up earlier out of his pocket. "I'll distract him."

Rose moved towards him, ignoring how odd it was to see anyone pull a sword out of their trouser pocket, and grabbed his head. She turned his face towards her and pulled him down into a fierce, if all too short, kiss. She leaned back slightly, hands still tangled in his hair, and gasped in a shaky lung full of air. "Be careful," she whispered out.

Her breath puffed out against his lips making them tingle even more than they already were. "Right," he said dumbly, the word coming out as more of a squeak than anything. He cleared his voice embarrassedly as Rose moved away from him. "On three," he said as he turned back to the Cyberman in front of him and fixed his grip on the hilt of the sword.

"One…" he said as he began to shift his body so he could swing the sword at the Cyberman easily.

"Two…" Rose again wrapped the long skirt of her dress in her hands so she could run as she and Jackie focused on the door just past the Cyberman's shoulder.

"NOW!" he shouted.

Rose and Jackie took off towards the door and the Cyberman began to move again. As it turned towards them, arm rising up to grab onto Rose, the Doctor's sword smashed into the side of his head causing it to tilt at an odd angle. The Cyberman stopped moving forward and straightened its head before slowly turning towards the Doctor.

The Doctor raised his sword ready for another attack and checked to make sure that Rose and Jackie had safely made it into the room.

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(((Authors Note: I would like to point out that I began writing this before the Christmas special aired and that I pay no attention to spoilers (I wish I didn't know that DT was leaving because its so much better to not have any clue as to what's going to happen. I think that might be part of the reasons Doomsday and PiC worked so well for me, I had no idea Rose was going to die or that she was going to come back (and I am in the US and watch the show when it airs on SciFi so the whole Rose thing in PiC was old news by the time I had seen it and I still had no idea she was going to show up)).

Unfortunately that, on very rare occasions (read as once ever), leads to me writing things that end up happening in the actual show. For instance I had the Doctor sword fighting a Cyberman written up before I saw the Christmas episode in which…well the Doctor sword fights a Cyberman (C'MON! How likely was that to happen really?) I briefly played with the idea of having the Doctor think something along the lines of 'I hope the other me isn't doing anything as daft as this.' In the end I decided against it because, well, I couldn't think of a way to say it without it sticking out as a way of me saying 'Yeah, I know it looks like I'm copying the show but I'm not' so instead you get a long authors note about it.

P.S. How cool was it that he sword fought a Cyberman in the show? I loved it.


	21. Chapter 21

Title: Into the Woods (20/21)  
Pairing: TenII/Rose  
Rating: PG  
Genre: Action/adventure, romance, drama (just a smidge)  
Spoilers: Just to be safe let's say everything up to JE.  
Disclaimer: I don't own them and I make no money off of them (if anything it's the other way around)  
Summary: After being left on the beach the Doctor, Rose and Jackie are forced to stay overnight in a small Norway village until they can get home, but something strange is happening in the quiet town.  
Authors Note: Well here it is, the end of the story. All that's left is my wrap up in the next chapter and this story will be done.

Thank you to my amazing beta mik109 you're a life saver.

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Time seemed to slow as Freya watched on, her heart in her throat, as the two women flew past the hulking metal form of the Cyberman and the Doctor set about fighting it with a sword.

Rose and Jackie barreled through the open doorway, neither of them bothering to shut the door behind them. Rose spun towards Freya, who was now standing near the back of the room and out of their way. "Where's your daughter?"

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The Doctor looked back to the Cyberman once Rose and Jackie had made it into the room just in time to see a set of metal fists come flying towards his face. He ducked beneath the first one, straightening up just in time to leap backwards in order to avoid the second one. The Cyberman followed him forward as he backed out of the entry way and towards the sitting room, the Cyberman's fists lashing out again and again only to be parried away by the sword.

The Doctor said a silent thank you to the fact that the Cyberman was working slower and weaker than it usually would. He would never have a chance against a fully functional one.

The back of the Doctors legs suddenly hit the hard edge of the coffee table. The still attacking Cyberman had backed him into the living room and successfully blocked him against the table. He couldn't move to either side, the Cyberman might be severely weakened but it was still a solid metal figure against his smaller, far more frail one. It would break him in half before he could take more than a step or two in either direction. With no where else to back up the Doctor leaned back, narrowly avoiding another punch, before jumping up onto the table itself. He had always been of the belief that if you can't work around something, work with it.

The Cyberman continued to throw punches at the Doctor, who in turn continued to block them though he wasn't able to attack further even from his higher position atop the coffee table. They were at, what some would call, an impasse. Neither of them was winning, and they didn't seem to be moving any more either, which suited one of them just fine seeing as he was the distraction and all.

Just as the Doctor had begun thinking, and a little smugly, that sword fighting a Cyberman wasn't all that bad (he should have tried it ages ago, he was rather good with a sword after all) the Cyberman had apparently decided that the best way around an impasse was through the object that had brought it about.

With that the Cyberman kicked out, bringing its heavy metal leg slamming down through the middle of the table. The Doctor tumble to the floor amongst the tables splintered remains as the Cyberman regained its footing.

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Freya pointed to a small bed pushed to the corner of the room. In the middle of it, with an old red quilt pulled up and tucked around her, was the little girl, Maren. She looked small and pale even though the bed wasn't overly large. If it wasn't for the constant moving of her eyes beneath her eyelids, she would have easily been mistaken for dead.

"So?" Jackie turned to look at Rose expectantly. "How do we wake her up?"

"Why are you asking me?"

"I dunno. I thought you might have a plan or sumthin'."

Rose stared at her mother for a long moment, trying to decide how to take that comment. According to the Doctor, she, herself, had been asleep for at least three hours. During that time, he and her mother had escaped the town, found the townspeople, discovered what was going on and rescued her from a castle guarded by a dragon. If either of them should have a plan, even a vague one, it would most certainly not be her. "Well…How was the Doctor going to wake her up?"

"He said something about a backdoor in the program and how she'd just wake up."

"Did he say how he was going to find it?" she asked urgently trying her best to not shout at her mother.

"Not really," she answered honestly really searching her mind for anything he might have said. "Oh, he did say one thing."

"What?"

"He just said something about…being telepathic."

Rose's eyes grew wide as she stared at her mother. "That's not gonna work for us," she said slowly, her eyes darting down to the girl.

"Well, what else is there?" Jackie asked as she looked down at the pale form of the little girl in bed. "She's not part of the fairytales, and even if she was, I doubt we could find a prince charming suitable for a seven year-old anytime soon."

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The Doctor groaned as he clambered off of the floor, sword held tightly in hand even though it was at his side, ignoring the thought that splintered wood was one of the top five worst (not to mention uncomfortable) things to land on.

The Cyberman shot a fist out at the Doctor, who quickly pulled his sword up and once again blocked the punch aimed at his chest, taking a massive step backwards and out of the remains of the table as he did so. He could feel the far wall of the room growing ever closer as the Cyberman continued to move him back with each blow. The Doctor racked his mind quickly trying to devise a way out of his ever looming predicament.

A table was one thing to work with, a wall was something else entirely. Unless he could somehow get the Cyberman to punch through the wall and get stuck there he didn't really see any way of working with it. There was no way to work around it either, and he really doubted that if he asked nicely the fictional Cyberman that was currently trying to kill him would give him a timeout so he could reposition himself with more room to back up into.

Mind made up, though mostly due to a lack of options, the Doctor parried the next punch, this time pushing back against the Cyberman's arm with everything he had.

The Cyberman staggered back slightly, thrown off by the attack, and the Doctor darted around him, turning on his heel as soon as he passed it so he could be face to face with it again.

The Cyberman swung its arm out, aiming for the Doctor's head, as it turned back around. The Doctor blocked the blow, the metal of his sword tinging off the metal of the Cyberman's arm.

'If they kept fighting like this for long,' he thought bitterly, 'his hands were going to go numb from the reverberation of the sword.'

------------------------------------------

"There has to be something else. Something we can do," Rose asserted urgently as they stepped over to the bed.

"Like what?" Jackie asked as she stared down at the sleeping girl. "Tell her to wake up before she kills the Doctor?"

"That's not a bad idea."

"I wasn't being serious."

"Maren," Rose said as she sat on the edge of the girl's bed. "You have to wake up, now," she said softly, gently holding the girl's cold hand. "If you don't wake up, people are going to get hurt."

Rose stared down at the little girl, watching her face intently for any sign she had heard her as the sound of smashing furniture and metal hitting metal echoed through the house and into the small room.

"Fat lot of good that did," Jackie said bluntly when absolutely nothing changed.

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The Cyberman took a large step forward, throwing its arm out at the Doctor in a wide swipe. When the blade of the sword made contact with the metal forearm, the Cyberman's other hand shot forward, wrapping around the base of the sword's blade. It tightened its fist, crunching the metal in its hand, before pulling it roughly out of the Doctor's hands.

The Doctor watched in wide eyed dismay, slowly backing towards yet another wall, as the Cyberman threw his sword haphazardly into the other room, paying it no mind at all as it threw its other fist out towards his head once again.

The Doctor ducked, or to be perfectly accurate fell to the ground in a worried heap, as the Cyberman's fist hit the wall just above him, sending bits of the shattered stone into the air above his head. He staggered backward, scrambling to his feet as the Cyberman turned its body towards him. The Cyberman's body jerked. Its fist still stubbornly stuck in the wall. It turned back towards the wall quickly, jerking its body backwards as it attempted to remove its hand from the wall.

The Doctor stumbled slightly with a loud and triumphant "Ha!" as he watched it struggle with the wall for a moment honestly surprised that his earlier option on how to work with a wall actually worked, before spinning around and searching the floor for his discarded sword.

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Rose resisted the urge to chew on her thumbnail as she continued to look down at the little girl.

She pushed herself off the bed and turned towards her mother, determination written across her face. "How'd she get hooked into the virtual reality program?"

"How should I know?"

"You were with the Doctor. What did he say?" she asked exasperatedly.

"I dunno. He just went on about how she set it off and it hooked into her brain. He never said anything else about it."

Rose looked back at the little girl trying to connect the pieces in her head. "But… why her?" she whispered to herself as she bit her lower lip.

"Oh, I asked that," Jackie said suddenly getting Rose to spin towards her with an expectant look on her face. "He said it was because the ship finally had power."

"Yeah but," Rose started chewing her bottom lip worriedly, "just 'cause a computers on doesn't mean its going to start running programs."

"I just figured she must've tripped something," Jackie said with a small shrug. "You know, like a silent alarm or when you go to the shopping market and the doors open when you walk up to 'em."

Rose spun around quickly. "Freya, did she have anything unusual on her? Anything…ya know, sort of alien?" Rose asked hesitantly. She didn't have time to try and think of a way to ask the question without the other woman thinking she was crazy. Then again there was a stranger in this woman's living room sword fighting a Cyberman while fairytales took over her town, it's not like the situation could get stranger than that.

"Alien?"

"Yeah…alien."

Freya looked at her daughter, wracking her brain for anything that could fit the very vague description the young woman had given her. She slowly shook her head no.

"She didn't have anything with her out there?" Rose asked determinedly.

"Her father, for her last birthday, he gave her a necklace. But… it's just stone," she answered nervously. "Nothing alien."

Rose's face fell. She had been sure she was onto something with the alien gizmo angle. Things like this only ever happened to people who had some sort of gadget on them that would activate other alien devices.

"Stone?" Jackie asked slowly. "You mean stone like the cave stone? That cave out on the edge of town kind of stone?" Freya gave her an odd look and nodded. Jackie gasped and spun towards her daughter excitedly.

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The sword had slid to the far side of the room, resting at the base of the wall there. The Doctor ran towards it just as the Cyberman pulled free of the wall. He ducked down and grabbed the sword with both hands. In one fluid motion, he spun back up and towards the Cyberman swinging the sword towards it.

The Cyberman swung its arm out, catching the blade between the stone wall and its metal forearm. The thin metal of the sword broke under the pressure right in the spot the Cyberman had crushed when it had grabbed the sword away from the Doctor.

The Doctor stumbled back a few steps, the broken sword held in front of him. "Right, should have seen that coming," he grumbled dejectedly before he looked up at the again approaching Cyberman.

The Doctor chucked what remained of his sword at the Cyberman, the handle connecting with a heavy metal thunk against the Cyberman's head. The Doctor quickly turned and ran as fast as he could towards where everyone else was, the Cyberman not far behind.

He came bounding through the still open door, slamming it shut behind him and locking it with his sonic screwdriver. "We're going to have company in a second," he said quickly as he glanced at everyone in the room.

"Doctor, she's got a necklace made out of the same stuff that spaceship out in the woods is made of," Jackie said quickly as she joined him next to the door.

"Spaceship?" Freya asked meekly.

"She's not wearin' it," Rose shouted over to them as she moved away from the girl.

"Where is that necklace?" he demanded, his question punctuated by the rattling of the door behind him.

The hinges of the door creaked and groaned under the weight of metal fists. Freya gave a startled shout as the top hinge ripped away from the doorframe completely. The Doctor spun back towards the door, throwing himself against it in a feeble attempt to take some of the pressure off the straining hinges while the whole door continued to shake.

"It's stronger the closer it gets to her," he grunted out through gritted teeth as he continued to shove against the door. The hinges gave another pathetic groan under the weight and Jackie pushed herself against the door next to the Doctor.

"Freya!" Rose shouted at the frightened woman. "Where's the necklace?"

Freya gulped in a deep breath and pointed a shaky finger towards the dresser next to her daughter's bed. Rose dove across the end of the bed and began throwing everything on top of the dresser aside as she searched for the necklace. When she didn't find it, she yanked open the top drawer and began digging through it frantically.

The second hinge burst away from the wood frame. "This isn't working!" Jackie shouted as she pushed against the door even harder as the final hinge began to break free of the doorway.

Rose's hand hit something rough beneath the shirts in the second draw and wrapped around the cool stone of the necklace. The Doctor and Jackie fell away from the door, both spilling to the floor in heaps just as Rose pulled the necklace out of the drawer and threw it to the ground, smashing it under her heel. The necklace gave off a small spark just as the last hinge flew off the doorframe. All eyes were fixed on the door as it fell open, a shattered mess of wood tumbling to the ground in front of them.

There was nothing there.

Jackie gave out an exhausted laugh and laid back on the ground running a tired hand across her face. The Doctor pushed himself off of the ground with a low groan as a deep pain shot through his chest, right where the dragon's tail had hit him, letting him know his brand new body was definitely protesting the strenuous activity involved in saving the day.

He turned to look at Rose, now back in her black pants maroon top and blue leather. She was giving him a smile so big it could rival the one she gave him on that deserted street earlier. He returned the smile full force and had been about to say something when a hoarse voice cut through the happy silence. "Mor?"

Everyone turned towards the small figure sitting up in bed. The small figure rubbed her fists against her eyes, trying to wipe away the remaints of an all too vivid nightmare, as she looked around at the unfamiliar faces around her room. Freya ran to her now awake daughter, scooping her up into her arms all the while muttering nonsensically in her ear.

~TBC


	22. Chapter 22

Title: Into the Woods (21/21)

Pairing: TenII/Rose

Rating: PG

Genre: Romance and fluff for this chapter

Spoilers: Just to be safe let's say everything up to JE.

Disclaimer: I don't own them and I make no money off of them (if anything it's the other way around)

Summary: After being left on the beach the Doctor, Rose and Jackie are forced to stay overnight in a small Norway village until they can get home, but something strange is happening in the quiet town.

Authors Note: It's going to be at the end of the chapter since I'm sure I'll ramble on longer than anyone really wants to read.

Thank you to my amazing beta mik109, I couldn't have done this without you.

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Jackie pushed her way through the front door, taking a deep breath and enjoying the cool early morning air. The fake sun had faded completely and the real one was just beginning to peak its way over the horizon. All three of them, she, Rose and the Doctor, had left Freya and her daughter to themselves inside. It wasn't like she could understand anything either of them was saying anyhow as they'd gone back to spouting off in Norwegian again.

She looked around the still empty town. Someone would have to go to the caves under the town and tell everyone it was safe to come back out. That someone would most certainly not be her, she thought tiredly as she turned back towards her daughter and the Doctor.

On second thought, maybe she would go get the rest of the town. Rose and the Doctor were standing just behind her firmly wrapped in each other's arms. They were as close together as two people still fully clothed could be she decided a bit disgusted, though mostly just happy for the pair. With a shake of her head, she quickly made her getaway before their 'we saved the day' hug turned into their first official 'we saved the day' snog.

Rose breathed in deeply, taking in the smell of early morning Norway and the Doctor before sighing contentedly against his neck. He did the same before leaning back and moving his hand up to brush a few stray hairs behind her ear, his hand lingering on the side of her face longer than necessary. She leaned into the touch and let her eyes close lazily.

"You saved the day again," she murmured quietly finally enjoying the peace an almost completely abandoned town could give instead of finding it eerie.

"I did very little to save the day," he answered her seriously. "You're the one that actually woke her up," he pointed out as he ran his thumb over her cheek.

"Yeah, but you're the one that was sword fighting a Cyberman," Rose pointed out with a small quirk of her lips.

A goofy grin lit up his face at that. "So I was. It would seem that I'm still pretty good with a sword," he added a little smugly letting his hand drop away from her face.

"Even without your fighting hand?"

"I've still got my lucky hand," he said wiggling his fingers happily. "And a lucky hand is better than a fighting hand any time."

"You saved me, too," she added a little sadly.

"Well, of course I saved you," he said sternly. "Your mother never would have let me hear the end of it if I hadn't," he finished brushing off the serious connotation her words held with humor, which was something entirely him proving Donna hadn't changed him as much as some might think.

She knew him well enough to know he was trying to avoid a touchy subject by making a joke out of it. She also knew herself well enough to know if she let him get away with it now she would regret it later, even if it was all too tempting to ignore what might amount to a fight only a night after she finally got him back. "You should have saved the little girl first," she plowed ahead.

The Doctor shook his head. "No, I shouldn't."

Rose's eyes slid open slowly. "Doctor…people could have died –"

"iYou/i could have died," he answered her gruffly.

"I'm not –"

"Yes, you are," he said cutting her off again. His eyes were dark and piercing as he stared at her for a long, quiet moment. "You are Rose."

"What happens next time?" Rose asked nervously biting her lower lip as she watched him. "When it's not just a little girl and a small town in Norway? What happens when it's the whole country, or the world?" she asked him softly, the words sounding anything but accusing. "You can't sacrifice everyone for me. I need you to promise me you won't do that, again."

"If I lose you, then saving the world doesn't matter."

"Doctor –"

"It wouldn't. I don't have anything here except you," he said as he gently cupped her face between his hands again.

Rose stared into his eyes, her hands coming up to lie over his own. She took a shaky breath then exhaled slowly. "We're going to have to work on that, then," she said giving him a small watery smile.

He gave her a tight smile back, one that belied the turmoil created by the idea of losing her brought up in him. "Maybe you could work on being less jeopardy friendly," he said evenly in a desperate attempt to change the subject to anything else.

"I am not jeopardy friendly."

"Right," he agreed nodding his head with exaggerated enthusiasm, beyond thankful that she took his lead and moved their conversation in a more lighthearted direction. "That's why you cut your finger on a spinning wheel and fell asleep, Briar IRose/I."

"You're the one who made the trap door fall open."

"Saving all of our lives in the process as I remember it," he pointed out. "I'm also the one to fought off a fire-breathing dragon to save you."

"Oh, be fair. You hid from a fire-breathing dragon to save me."

"I hid very bravely so that your mother could get to safety thank you," he told her aghast at her thinly veiled accusation that he hid from danger, which couldn't be further from the truth and she knew it (though he supposed he had it coming because he did realize that she wasn't the only jeopardy friendly one in their relationship).

"Which brings up another point," he announced aggravatedly. "I was stuck with no one but your Mother for hours. That alone should prove I am nothing if not brave in the face of danger."

"Yes, you very bravely tolerated my Mother for over three hours."

"That's a lot harder than you make it sound," he whined as she chuckled. "Do you have any idea how hard it is to figure out what's going on with her around? She ruins the flow of every single one of my brainstorming moments."

Rose bit her bottom lip hard to keep from laughing at him. "Brainstorming moments?" she asked quietly, worried the laughter would come bubbling out of her at any second.

"Yes. Why? What do you call them?"

Rose stared at him for a long moment. "Brainstorming moments works," she agreed with a fervent nod of her head.

He raised a skeptical eyebrow at her but decided to let the comment pass. "She complains all the time, too," he added quietly.

"I know."

"About everything. Things I didn't even have anything to do with," he continued to complain.

Rose resisted the urge to roll her eyes at him. She had already almost laughed at him rolling her eyes wouldn't do anything to make the situation better. "Maybe all this time you two spent together might have endeared you to her? You know, just a bit?" she added hopefully.

The look the Doctor gave her told her how unlikely that outcome was. "Rose," he began gravely, "if the past few hours have done anything to the, and I use this term loosely, 'relationship' between your mother and I it's been nothing but damaging."

"Oh," Rose began to protest but before she could get very far he cut her off again.

"Rose, we spent the entire time running around being shot at by Cybermen, held at gunpoint by Norwegians in a cave, sneaking around a forest and a crashed spaceship and being attacked by a dragon. If anything comes of this, it'll be a slap because I put you into situations like this all the time."

Rose gave him a tiny smile, he did have a point. Her Mum might have known that working for Torchwood was dangerous and saving the world was anything but safe most of the time but that probably wouldn't stop her from blaming it all on him. She opened her mouth about to reassure him that, slap or no slap Jackie really did like him…or at least tolerated him because she knew how much her daughter liked him, but never got the chance as the door to the house next to them flew open.

Freya and her daughter quickly moved forward, speaking non-stop as they looked at the two of them still standing closely together. Freya grabbed Rose's hand and began shaking it, barely pausing for breath as she did so. The Doctor nodded and smiled at Freya warmly as she turned towards him and did the same.

Rose watched the Doctor, a smile tugging at her lips as he said something back to Freya. He gave the pair a wide smile as they thanked him profusely. Or at least, she imagined they were thanking him. For all she knew, they were telling him the best place to find banana pancakes in town, something he would most likely be just as glad to hear. He said something back to them in, as far as she could tell, a flawless Norwegian accent earning him a pair of bright smiles and a hug from the little girl.

It was strange to hear him speaking a different language. It was easy for her to forget that he was an alien and that he didn't just speak English, it wasn't even his native tongue. The TARDIS had always made sure she understood everyone just fine. She stifled a sigh as Freya and her daughter moved away from them in search of Jackie.

"So they thanking us, then?" she asked as she watched them shout after Jackie.

He gave her a lazy lopsided grin. "What you didn't understand what they were saying?" he asked nudging her with his shoulder.

"Not a word."

"Well, you wouldn't, would you? With the virtual reality turned off there's nothing to translate for you," he grinned at her.

Rose shook her head slightly looking around the empty streets, no beanstalks or Gingerbread men, not a single pumpkin turned carriage or even the remains of a house made of straw that had been blown down. It was a completely normal looking town once again. "I still can't believe none of it was real."

"That's because the Tusharens were brilliant. Did you know every form of virtual reality across the whole universe is based, at least in some part, off their designs? They created a lifelike virtual reality big enough to store all of their thoughts, or a small town in Norway it would seem, and that requires some amazing technology. Can you imagine trying to get any other virtual reality system to do what this one did? Though, I guess that's sort of the point. None of them could, they just weren't big enough for their minds. It would be like trying to shove an elephant into a roach motel."

"That what it would be like for you?"

"Me? Oh, no. Not really that bad. More like a horse into a roach motel…or maybe a Donkey," he mused out loud earning himself a small chuckle from Rose before he amended the statement. "A large donkey…but Time Lords, while having a great big brain, aren't completely telepathic. The Tusharen are. Everything is in their heads, every conversation, every argument, every song or play. It all takes place in their minds. They have no vocal cords. Well, they have no mouths either which I suppose is a slightly more obvious way of saying they're completely telepathic. They also have no noses, but that's because they have a semi-permeable skin to absorb any air, liquid or nutrition they need to live, and also it's not really important to the point I was trying to make."

"What point was that?" she asked him grinning at the way he rambled on non-stop and more than a little happy to realize that even after years apart and having a little bit of Donna in him he still had a gob like no other.

"My point was that you, Rose Tyler, are brilliant."

"Well, when you've got it, you've got it," she said with sarcastic bravado.

"No, really. You figured out that little Maren over there had to have something alien with her to have turned on the stasis pod. That was brilliant. It's much easier to disrupt the signal that kept the stasis pod's virtual reality systems connected with her than trying to find the backdoor in the programming," he told her enthusiastically.

He missed this. Working with her to save the day, getting to compliment her when she did something particularly brilliant, the bright smile she would give him every time he did. She really was brilliant, always had been too. He sometimes worried he had mucked things up with her for the most part when they first started traveling together.

Sure by the end of his ninth self calling her an ape had become something of an endearment, but it hadn't started that way. He had been rude, stubborn, he had a bit of a superiority complex not to mention a bit of a thing for brooding. Well basically, he had been the exact same except he had also been incredibly standoffish on top of it all. Being petty and pushing people, well her, away had seemed like the only smart thing to do and no matter what the other him said he wasn't that man anymore. He didn't think he'd ever be that man again, not after her.

"Fascinating piece of technology you had to stomp on though," he started up again, barely a pause regardless of where his mind had wondered off to. "It has a kind of genetic memory marker that imprints on whoever last wore it. That's why it kept working even though she wasn't wearing it any more. It's also why they Cyberman didn't kill her mother," he continued to prattle on. "It couldn't be sure which one of them was hooked up to the virtual reality because their genetic makeup is so similar and why are you looking at me like that?" he asked suddenly, the question ramming into the tail end of his sentence unceremoniously.

Rose grinned at him and shook her head a little. "Nothin', just missed this," she told him honestly. "Missed you," she added quietly at the end looking up at him in a half lidded kind of wonder, like she still wasn't completely sure he was really there.

The Doctor smiled in response and desperately wanted to tell her he wasn't going anywhere if he could help it except he couldn't find his voice because of the way she was looking at him. It was doing all sorts of strange things to his stomach and he was almost certain she could hear his single heart thundering inside of his chest at the moment.

She leaned towards him, rocking onto the balls of her feet so she could stand closer to him. Her hands were fisted in the lapels of his jacket, just like the last time only she wasn't pulling him towards her. Instead, he leaned down towards her languidly, the thudding of his heart in his chest loud in his ears and the feel of her breath puffing out against his lips causing them to tingle.

He paused briefly to savor the moment. It would be their first real kiss, the first kiss not born out of some greater purpose, lie, or years of unresolved sexual tension. It would be the first of many, many kisses to come and that thought alone made him lightheaded.

He quickly closed the distance between their lips.

Her lips were softer than he remembered was the first thing that popped into his head as he slowly moved his mouth across hers. It was warm and gentle as they kissed almost hesitantly, the pressure building between them. His hand slowly snaked its way up from her waist. The tips of his fingers barely touched her neck as he drug them upwards to tangle in her hair. A shiver ran through her body and she made a happy little whimpering sound at the sensation.

He cupped the back of her head, his fingers playing in her hair as he tilted her head back farther to deepen the kiss. She pressed herself even closer, enjoying the warm stretch of his body against hers, as she threaded both of her hands through his hair to keep him right where he was.

A deep guttural moan tore through him at the first swipe of her tongue against the seam of his lips. His mouth fell open and Rose gave a happy hum as their tongues slid against each other.

"Figures," a voice came from behind them, making them break apart. "I have to come rushing in to save the day only to find it's already been saved by someone else Iand/I that same someone else is getting snogged senseless."

"Ah, Jake Simmonds," the Doctor said as a group of soldiers with the all too familiar Torchwood insignia on their uniforms rounded the corner just behind him. "Better late than never I suppose," he said fighting down the urge to punch the younger man in the face for ruining a perfectly good, brilliant if he was being honest with himself, well deserved and incredibly overdue kiss with Rose. She wrapped her hand in his and gave it a small squeeze as if to tell him she felt the same, or maybe she knew he had been considering punching Jake and was silently thanking him for following his better judgment and not letting that bit of Donna take over.

"We're only as fast as our transportation lets us be and zeppelins have never been very fast," he said, giving both the Doctor and Rose a wary look. "Have to say I didn't expect to see you ever, again," he said blankly, the statement obviously meant for both of them.

"Yeah, well," the Doctor began to say as he and Rose looked at one another again.

"Looks like you're going to be stuck with us for a while, now," she said, her hand tightening around the Doctor's.

Jake nodded, a smile tugging at his lips. "You know, I told your dad there was nothing to worry about. 'There are strange energy readings in Norway' he told me. He absolutely refused to believe me when I said you'd have it under control. Personally, I think he's just been going a bit bonkers with you and your mom away."

Rose gave him a small smile for that.

Jake returned the smile and shook his head in amusement. "We'll take care of the rest of this," he said simply waving his hand around at the empty town, "you two can go and relax," he said with a nod towards a trio of big black SUV's that the group of Torchwood troops had arrived in before turning away from them and following after a pair of Torchwood agents who were currently speaking with Freya and her daughter.

Rose squeezed the Doctor's hand gently. Even with the three hours she had spent in a magic induced slumber, she was completely knackered. She didn't even want to think of how her Mum or the Doctor were doing.

"So is that normal Torchwood procedure, then?" he asked as they continued on towards the SUV. "To swan in at the very end, when everything's already been taken care of, and take all of the credit for a job well done?"

"You'd be surprised how often it happens actually," Rose said sarcastically with a mischievous smirk aimed his way. "Besides, they deserve it," she said with a nod towards the team.

"Oh?"

"Well, they really did save the day, didn't they?"

"How did they do that?"

"'Cause, now, we don't have to wait for that zeppelin in Bergen. We can just get a ride back with them."

The Doctor's face lit up immediately "Well, in that case, bravo and well played Torchwood," he pulled her along after him as he started towards the big black SUV from Torchwood with renewed vigor. "How long is the flight from here to London at any rate?"

"Couple of hours," Rose said as they fell into step.

"Good, plenty of time, then," he said seriously with an overdramatic nod of his head. "You know, I think I'm actually going to sleep," he said with a bemused grin.

Rose grinned back at him and leaned in to give his shoulder a bump with her own as they walked.

"Isn't this the part where you give me some quip about telling me a fairytale to help me get to sleep?" the Doctor asked her in mock seriousness.

Rose snorted and shook her head. "I don't even want to joke about that."

The pair climbed into the back seat of the SUV, Rose curling against the Doctor's side as his arm wrapped around her.

"You two aren't going to start snogging are you?" Jackie asked angrily from the front seat. "'Cause I got in here to make sure I didn't have to see that."

The two answered her in unison with annoyed calls of "Mum" and "Jackie". She threw her hands up in front of her in surrender. "Alright…just making sure," she muttered before turning back around and wiggling in the front seat until she found a comfortable position.

After a few moments, Jackie was silently snoring away in the front seat and it would have taken a force far greater than any found on Earth, let alone Norway, to wake her.

The Doctor grinned lazily into Rose's hair as she cuddled closer to him. The hand she didn't have wrapped around his waist was fisted in the lapel of his jacket. She huffed out a sleepy sigh as she began to draw lazy patterns on the worn material. Falling asleep with Rose Tyler in his arms was definitely an ideal situation he decided as he finally let his eyes slip shut.

"Doctor?" Rose asked so quietly he had to convince himself it wasn't part of a dream.

"Hmm?" he hummed, the sound lower and quieter than he had expected. He knew he was tired but he didn't expect to sound so haggard.

"I love you," she said quietly as she continued to play with his jacket.

His eyes shot open and his breath caught in his throat at her words. It was the first time she had said so since that day on the beach when they were a universe away from each other. He had told her several times since they were left behind, not nearly enough times if he was honest but Donna or no Donna old habits were hard to break, but she hadn't said it since.

Rose Tyler still loved him. She even loved this new, sleepier, human version of him. His heart skipped a beat at the thought, which was a little disturbing since he only had the one heart now and he needed it to keep working correctly if for no other reason than being able to answer her right now.

She pulled her head away from his chest when he didn't say anything. The beginnings of a sleepy frown worked at the corners of her mouth.

"Quite right too," he murmured huskily, well he hoped she took it as husky because in reality it was hoarsely which wasn't nearly as romantic.

The look she gave him let him know that answer was definitely not what she had expected to hear but before she could comment on it he had begun kissing her again.

A thrill shot through her as his lips nudged at hers and his tongue gained entry to her mouth. Her knees went weak as he explored her mouth and she was beyond thankful to be sitting in the back of the SUV instead of standing.

She moaned quietly and turned as best she could in the cramped backseat pressing as much of her body to his as she could. She tangled her hands into his hair, which still looked perfect even after everything they had been through that night, and kissed him for all she was worth. She felt more than she heard the groan that fell from his lips as she deepened the kiss.

She kissed him, tasted him, and breathed him in. Her heart thudded so hard she was almost certain it would burst and she decided at that moment that she could definitely, and would if she had anything to say about it, spend the rest of her life kissing him.

"How long are you going to stay with me?" she asked, gasping in a deep and much needed breath as she pulled away from him just far enough that their noses and foreheads were still pressed together.

"Forever," he answered her breathlessly leaning forward to capture her lips once again.

~The End

AN: So I guess this means they really did just start snogging in the SUV and thus they lied to Jackie. Whatever you do don't wake up Jackie! You don't want to see what's happening in the back seat!

_AN2: I started plotting out this story at the tail end of last semester and I decided to write it up over winter break. The story was going to be a short and sweet little thing (4 chapter's tops) but, as I tend to do, it changed drastically and grew uncontrollably as I began to write it. Eventually my little story had begun to turn into a mini epic._

_I knew that if I didn't make sure I finished the whole story before posting it that I would never actually finish it, I'm really bad that way. I fought the urge to get some feedback (by posting a short Doctor Who fic that I wrote out of frustration with chapter 5 and a horrible lack of internet access) and I continued to write until it was finished._

_And here it is. My mini epic weighs in at twenty chapters an interlude and an epilogue and over 60,000 words (that's 113 pages in Microsoft word at 10 point in Arial font)._

_Basically, I wrote a novel over my winter break which is all kinds of cool._

_I just want to thank everyone that's read and commented on the story it really means a lot. My stupendous beta always says that we write for ourselves and not for the reviewers and I've always argued a bit with her over that (I know how the story ends I write for the viewer and the only way I know if I'm doing well or not is if I get reviews) so really thank you. You've all made me feel very welcomed and loved in a brand new fandom and I really appreciate it._


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